An Analysis of Yeats and Updike

In stanza four the poet is flashing back to his childhood and telling us some other words that he got in trouble for. “Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright, wren and yarn.” (29-31) Even though he got in trouble by his teacher for not knowing the words, his mother helped him understand them in a different way. “Wren are small, plain birds.” (34) “My mother made birds out of yarn.” (37) Here he is shown how two different things can become the same thing.

While Yeats becomes conscious of the violent truth of nature which results in death, by watching the swans, he is able to comfort himself by admiring how the swans are “unwearied” and “their hearts have not grown old.” When

William Butler Yeats is one of the most esteemed poets in 20th century literature and is well known for his Irish poetry. While Yeats was born in Ireland, he spent most of his adolescent years in London with his family. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he later moved back to Ireland. He attended the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin and joined the Theosophical Society soon after moving back. He was surrounded by Irish influences most of his life, but it was his commitment to those influences and his heritage that truly affected his poetry. William Butler Yeats’s poetry exemplifies how an author’s Irish identity can help create and influence his work.

Some scholars wonder if the Leda and the Swan was a way Yeats used to show how he truly felt about Ireland’s downward spiral; how the English were destroying their culture and way of life. Scholars developed this theory based on the social-political issues going on between England and Ireland at the time the poem was written.

The speaker in Yeats’s’ “When You Are Old” is utterly captivated by the woman he depicts as being old in the poem. His amorous attitude toward her is unchanging, yet afflictive because he cannot get her to understand his undying love for her. Furthermore, these feelings are gracefully portrayed through dreamy imagery, a bittersweet tone, a gentle quatrain form, and soft diction.

     When You are Old, by William Butler Yeats, represents and elderly woman reminiscing of her younger days. A past lover whispers to her as she looks through a photo album. Basically, Yeats is showing that as the woman gets older, she is alone, but she does not have to be lonely. She will always have her memories for companionship.

In the final stanza, Yeats draws his most striking contrast of all to illustrate his message. He does this by following the descriptions of nature in its wildest form, of the previous stanzas, with those of the domestic atmosphere from which the child is being taken, in this stanza. Initially, Yeats established the setting of the poem in the first stanza by describing a place "Where flapping herons wake / The drowsy water rats" (5). This is contrasted in this stanza with images of "calves on the warm hillside / Or the kettle on the hob / Or... the brown mice" (45). Calves, kettles, and mice are all images that are associated with a domestic farm or a country home. Thus, this imagery is being used to portray how modern society has enslaved nature, controlling its freedom. Water rats and herons, on the other hand, are both wild and free animals that are found near water, the symbol

Who knows when a Nobel Prize would have been given to an Irish man if it had not been for William Butler Yeats? William Butler Yeats is a great figure in the history of Irish poetry and playwriting. He wrote many poems and plays throughout his entire life. He was a very modernist man and many of his poems were based on this, they were ahead of his time beautiful and inspiring. What was behind William Butler Yeats success, and what phases did he have to go through to get there. This man has influenced many poems and plays, writing and he has also inspired so many people around the world.

The fifth stanza describes the quality that Yeats came to see as at the very heart of civilized life: courtesy. By courtesy he understands a means of being in the world that would protect the best of human dignity, art and emotion. And in his prayer for his daughter he wishes that she will learn to survive with grace and dignity in a world turned horrific. He explains that many men have hopelessly loved beautiful women, and they thought that the women loved them as well but they did not.

Although the ‘swallow’s flight”, the “sycamore” and the “lime tree” are linked by their belonging to men’s natural environment, the musicality of the stanza, notable through the use of full end-rhymes; “flight” (v1) and “night” (v3), unifies these elements. The motif of the swallow’s flight is an allegory of the artistic creation and is developed throughout the whole poem. In this first stanza, the rhythmical harmony is increased by numerous alliterations such as the alliterations in “l”, m” (v 1 to 3) and “s” (v 3 to 7); “Great works constructed there in nature’ spite”(v5). From the second verse, W.B Yeats evokes the passage of time through the figure of the “aged woman and her house”(v2). Here, the poet depicts Lady Gregory, the aristocratic owner of Coole Park. Sold in 1927 to the Irish state by her daughter in law, Lady Gregory was forced to give

He wrote” there would be forgotten us, sadness is no longer coming; Soon will be far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the, as long as we are double white bird, dear, and in the surf”. However, this pursuit is always so bear, so full of romantic, not bear rich life and universal truth. His poems from the early natural express, to the old age of meditation concise, completed a real thought and art practice. As when he won the Nobel Prize for literature, said: "now I'm old and sick, the form is not worth a curse, but therefore I Muse and young." In his view, "except for the sun had nothing, but he didn't escape from reality, also in reality. He knew that, only put the needle in the meat, because, mist and tears, to walk to god." In the bound for Byzantine, Yeats in the anatomy of himself: "a decay, the old man is a waste, it is a broken coat, on a stick, clap your hands unless the soul as a song, to its skins sings louder every crack bursts. In pursuit of truth, of his ruthlessness, have the courage to expose the weakness of human

Of all the poets in our course, WB Yeats is easily our favorite. His poetry has a dynamic quality. Several aspects of his poetry that appeal the most to us are the political or polemical dimension to his work, his use of nature as a theme and his reflection on old age, body and the soul and finally his discussion on mysticism and reincarnation of the

bird’s fluttering with every breeze” which suggests that the lover is indecisive and is ready to run from a relationship. The figurative link between the speaker and the weathercock’s compass directions permits the central image of the poem to further encompass the romantic relationship defining the lover and the speaker. The speaker’s body is highlighted in the poem only in terms of this figurative ordering. It points to the fact that the lyricism of Jennings’s early short poems conceives written identity in terms of abstract voice, whose urge to expression holds a physical embodied self only as a basis of metaphorical material. Thus the poem adds a definition of what might be considered the Movement lyric, with its focus on discursive voice

Yeats is essentially a poet of ‘modern complexities’. His transition from ‘romantic’ to ‘modern’ is perhaps the failure of hope or vision he had for Ireland and thus, he resorted to the modern tone of distress and hopelessness similar to the case of Eliot in Hollow Men. Inactivity of the generation made him suffocated and thus, he wrote Sailing to Byzantium, a utopian civilization for the old yet energetic, the city of Byzantium.

Yeats assumes that the readers know about the Greek myth of Zeus, sky and weather god, taking the form of a swan to violate Leda, Aetolian princess who later becomes a famous Spartan Queen. The opening lines start off presumably in Leda’s perspective when he states, “A sudden blow” (Yeats 1), meaning that the Swan harshly approaches Leda and knocks her off her feet. We now can assume that the swan is larger than normal for it to have such extreme power to induce a great deal of force onto an unexpecting woman. In line 4, “He” (Yeats 4) is written for the first time so readers now know that the swan is of male nature; this explains the large size and strength of the swan. In the following stanza, through the first line Yeats chooses the word “vague” (Yeats 5) to describe how Leda is so terrified and disoriented when being violated by the swan. This can lead the reader to wonder if Leda could have even prevented the violation? The answer is clear, it would be incredibly absurd that she could have. When Yeats asks, “And how can body” (Yeats 7), he is