Byzantium And Atonement

The poem “Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?” by William Butler Yeats is a poem that brings insight into Yeats is life and his perception of life. In this poem, Yeats transmits to the reader how life can be unpredictable. This poem portrays the true reality of life, which is bitter and harsh. Yeats is focus in this poem is turned towards life and he uses many people close to him in this poem to demonstrate examples of how life can be a game of fate. Yeats in this poem tries to explain how nothing can be sure about life.

While both Keats and Longfellow often reflect on their own unfulfilled dreams and impending deaths, the poems however contrast on their own dispositions towards death and the future. Here, Keats expresses a fear of not having enough time to accomplish all that he believes he is capable of doing, but as he recognizes the enormity of the world and his own limitations of life, he realizes that his own mortal goals are meaningless in the long run of things. On the other hand, Longfellow speaks of a regret towards his inaction for allowing time to slip away from him in his past and is at a crossroads for the ominous future that looms ahead of him. Through the use of light and dark imagery, and personification, Keats and Longfellow similarly yet also differently, reflect on their own ideas for death and the futures that lay ahead of them.

All throughout this poem death is foreshadowed. In lines 1-3 it says “All out of doors looked darkly in at him through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, that gathers on the pane in empty rooms.” Nature is personifying death in these lines. The old man does not want to die yet, but death is looking right in at him and he cannot keep it away. Death is approaching the old man. There is also lots of imagery displayed in this line. The

The Byzantium recognized church and state as corresponding parts of the whole empire. This obviously caused problems because church and state has their own authority. This made it difficult to decide which one has more authority. This especially causes feuds in the West, due to not agreeing on whom had the power. The East, however differed with the West in this. In the East their structure was “symphonia” aka they had harmony, between each to.(pg.129).

Similarly, the poem ‘When You Are Old’ by William Butler Yeats is of women being told what it will be like when she becomes older. However, in this poem when she becomes older she will regret passing on a young man’s love instead of become the older women filled with joy of being an older and without cares the person in ‘Afternoon’. Both poems are of younger people looking into the future of when they become older but the results are much

In the first verse of the poem, the speaker tells whomever they are speaking to that she shouldn't be cautious when entering the night. Here, night is used as a metaphor for death. In the second verse, the speaker states that old men should be strong and lively when they are close to death. Again, there is another metaphor for death which is "the close of day". In the final verse of the stanza, the speaker encourages the old men to fight "against the dying of the light"-another metaphor for death. In the first line of the second stanza, the speaker says that although smart men who are close to death know that their end is inevitable, (verse 3) they do not die gently, instead they fight because (verse 3) they haven't sparked a fire with their

By studying the ways that the two authors approach each individual work of art, we can gain valuable insight into the mindset of each man. It is interesting to see how each author views and deals with the concept of death and how their individual courses of life guided them to their own views that appear in their poems.

Stanza three is where the poet reflects on the old man and thinks about how he must live his life. Edwin Morgan creates an image of how the world is to the old man:

William Butler Yeats’ texts have become more valued over time as they have explored difficult and lasting concepts that relate to the human condition across time frames. The ideas include; unrequited love, chaos and change, and death. These ideas are explored throughout his 3 poems “When you are old” written in 1893, “The Second Coming” written in 1919 and “An Irish airman foresees his death” written in 1918. Yeats wrote, “When you are Old” when he was 28 and the poem talks about his unrequited love for Maude Gonne. “An Irish airman foresees his death” was written during WW1, where death was occurring all over. “The Second Coming” was written after WW1 when Yeats thought that the European society had pretty much broken down, and his

One point this poem provides is the reaction someone shows when coming to terms with death. In the first paragraph, on the second sentence of the poem, it says, “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;”(2). This line illustrates the author's feelings about aging. Saying it should be destroyed. In the second paragraph, on the fourth sentence, it states, “Though wise men at their end know dark is right,”(4) The “wise men” the poem talks about, are dying because it mentions that they are “at their end”. And with them knowing that “dark is right” is them accepting their deaths. Plus, it is mentioned multiple times throughout the poem “Do not go gentle into that goodnight.” This is saying the men in this poem refuse death. Or the author's plea to the audience, telling them to fight against death. Also, in the fifth paragraph in sentence fifteen,

The Byzantine Empire was the continuation of the Roman Empire in the Greek-speaking, eastern part of the Mediterranean. Christian in nature, it was perennially at war with the Muslims, Flourishing during the reign of the Macedonian emperors, its demise was the consequence of attacks by Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, and Ottoman Turks.

In the fourth stanza the poet’s agony rings out even more passionately. Here he stresses that Nature notice his grief, calling it to extinguish the stars and the moon and the sun and get rid of the ocean. He desires the world to reflect the emptiness within him left by death. Human monuments to the dead will not be adequate at best. There is no optimism at the end of the poem; the reader is left with the very real and very hostile sense of the man’s grief, since no end can be accomplished without the poet’s

The poem by W. B. Yeats is considered one of the greatest poems in the English language and quite frankly, it’s very understandable to why it is. He speaks up about growing old in this poem and he brings up how as you get older, people tend to realize that the world is for young people and that old people are just around, watching as the younger generation makes the world the way it is. Sailing To Byzantium is one of the more well-known poems that point out that as you get older, a person begins to realize what is actually going on and that the world isn’t really meant for the old and more so the young. In the poem, Sailing To Byzantium, the three messages that were the most pointed out is wisdom comes with age, the world is for the young and

    The view of death from an aged individual can be one of acceptance of his life’s end or one of mystified wonder over the immortality of the soul. Both William Butler Yeats and David Herbert Lawrence take the latter view in their respective poems, "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Shadows." By viewing death as a continuation of their soul’s life in a different realm of being, they provide a comforting solution to the fear that death may be the end of their existence. In W.B. Yeats’ "Sailing to Byzantium" and D.H. Lawrence's "Shadows," death is addressed from the viewpoint of one preparing for its eminent arrival; Yeats, however, expresses the belief that he can live

Thesis: Ulysses seems to contain two messages in one: on the one hand, it dramatizes the persona of the self-reliant, independent human (aka Emerson and Nietzsche and fashioned after the god Ulysses of Homer's ancient Greek poem), on the other hand, it seems to be a gloomy prospect of death and the need to accept one's mortality. Yet even death itself is dominated by the powerful image of the self-reliant man. Optimism and confidence shines through, as Helstrom (1972) points out, right to the very end when the author exclaims: "Something ere the end.. may yet be done" (p.96). Old though he may be and sighting the end, the resilient sailor still hopes to catch immortality by memories of his life succeeding his death. Ulysses, as shown by metric, theme, subject, and all poetic stools is a poem that celebrates life rather than one that mourns its end.