Hsc English - Module B - Yeats' Poems

On May 11, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory that he had received a letter from his long-time muse Maud Gonne, who had written from France with the belief that the revolutionaries had “raised the Irish cause again to a position of tragic dignity” (White 372). He went on to relate his own attempts to interpret recent events: “I am trying to write a poem on the men executed—‘terrible beauty has been born again.’” (Wade 613). The phrase “terrible beauty,” with its initial “t” and final “ty,” seems to echo Gonne’s “tragic dignity,” though the negatively charged “terrible” strains against “beauty,” making Yeats’s phrase more ambivalent than Gonne’s. Yeats may not have used the word “tragic,” but a sense of tragedy pervades “Easter, 1916.” Recalling life before the

Consequently, “Who Goes with Fergus?” is a very complex poem. It presents a stimulus for the young people to give up on their political struggle and instead find the mysteries of nature: “Who will go with Fergus now,/ And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,/ And dance upon the level shore?”. Moreover, the poem also represents the poet’s own frustration over his own lapsed romance. He is decided to leave his love behind and try to amend his situation by following Fergus: “And no more turn aside and brood/ Upon love’s bitter mystery;”. But more than anything, as was stated above, this poem symbolizes an analogy in order to stimulate the young into fighting for a better Ireland – showing in this poem, once again, Yeats’ own sense of nationalism.

Frost further points out that the stretch of woods being viewed is very rural. This is made possible by the reference to the location between the woods and frozen lake. In closing the final sentence of the second stanza Frost reiterates the fact that this occurs on “the darkest evening of the year” stating the darkness of the mood.

When Yeats moved back to London to pursue his interest in Arts, he met famous writers like Maud Gonne. The Poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times” is one of the poems Yeats wrote in 1892 and was published in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends. “Know, that I would accounted

The images of a war-torn landscape and the anonymity of the mother murdered at her door evoke the feelings of fear felt by readers in the time. Bradley writes “Yeats’ language broadens the context so that so that it could be any mother and child in the ravaged landscape of wartime” (115). The violet nature of the poem provides a domineering relation to place, one which feels inescapable. According to Michael Wood, violence in Yeats’ poetry “whether personal, political or apocalyptic—is always sudden and surprising, visible, unmistakable, inflicts or promises injury and is fundamentally uncontrollable.”

After his vision Yeats is sure of two things: that history is repeating itself, even if the new era is an altered form of the old one, and that he is a member of the “new paganism”. This explains the awe that fills the poem in its closing. An illustration of a rebirth into Paganism will be filled more with fear and awe than love for this reason: Christianity worships God in his love as a being of supreme good, but pagans worship the spirit of the world as a being of supreme power. Furthermore, his cadence in the last phase of the poem implies that he is almost speaking with reverence to the spiritus mundi and a quite disdain for what he sees as a flaw in Christianity. This brings us to the final two lines in “The Second Coming”, “And what rough beast, its hour come ‘round at last/ slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” This first sums up the poems theme of a “Second Coming” of paganism as opposed

During the time in which Yeats was writing the poem, the world was in the midst of events like the First World War, Russian Revolution and political strife in his own country, Ireland. The first stanza in the poem represents this as Yeats captures and encourages the image of political unrest and confusion. It talks about the fall of family values, social structure, and religious disbelief. This is also represented in “September 1913,” another of Yeats poems, as he presents the changed in Irelands national identity. This first stanza also implies that the old rules no longer matter anymore and instead of rules there was confusion and chaos. The first too lines specifically is a metaphor that the world is spiralling out of control. The relationship

     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 ‘Ministry of fear’ Heaney alludes to many other poems and poets, the most obvious of which was Patrick Kavanagh, An Irish Poet who’s work Heaney discovered in the early 1960’s and for which he developed an increasing respect throughout the decade, Kavanagh seemed to Heaney to illustrate the split he himself was experiencing between “the illiterate self that was tied to the little hills and earthed in the stony grey soil, and the literate self that pined for the city of kings, where art, music and letters were the real things” He also alludes to Yeats as in “Casualty.” Yeats’s ‘ Ancestral Houses’ which speaks of a ‘rich mans flowering lawns’ and of his ‘planted hills’ much in the same way as Haney describes the “fine lawns of elocution. By referencing all these other poets,

Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," written in 1919 and published in 1921 in his collection of poems Michael Robartes and the Dancer, taps into the concept of the gyre and depicts the approach of a new world order. The gyre is one of Yeats' favorite motifs, the idea that history occurs in cycles, specifically cycles "twenty centuries" in length (Yeats, "The Second Coming" ln. 19). In this poem, Yeats predicts that the Christian era will soon give way apocalyptically to an era ruled by a godlike desert beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man (ln. 14). Critics have argued about the exact meaning of this image, but a close reading of the poem, combined with some simple genetic work, shows

Mr. Yeats relates his vision, either real or imagined, concerning prophesies of the days of the Second coming. The writer uses the Holy Bible scripture text for his guide for because no one could explain this period of time without referring to the Holy Bible. He has chosen to present it in the form of a poem, somewhat like the quatrains of Nostradamus. The poem does not cover all the details of this event, but does give the beginning of the powerful messages, and a dark look at those ominous days surrounding the Second Coming of The Lord Jesus Christ. Perhaps he is trying in his own words to warn everyone about the end time days.

The twenty-four old romantic poet John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” written in the spring of 1819 was one of his last of six odes. That he ever wrote for he died of tuberculosis a year later. Although, his time as a poet was short he was an essential part of The Romantic period (1789-1832). His groundbreaking poetry created a paradigm shift in the way poetry was composed and comprehended. Indeed, the Romantic period provided a shift from reason to belief in the senses and intuition. “Keats’s poem is able to address some of the most common assumptions and valorizations in the study of Romantic poetry, such as the opposition between “organic culture” and the alienation of modernity”. (O’Rourke, 53) The irony of Keats’s Urn is he likens

Through this poem, Yeats suggested that the middle classes only cared about money, not the freedom of their country. He tended to romanticize the aristocracy and peasants but hated the middle classes for their indifference to Ireland. (Abrams 2303) Yeats also implied that because of the selfishness, they made everything meaningless, destroying the romantic Ireland.

William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” after World War 1 ended, in a time when the image of society was catastrophic. Yeats was deeply affected by these horrors caused by the war. Yeats predicts this image of a catastrophic society due to war will reappear in the near future. In “The Second Coming”, William B. Yeats uses a variety of literary devices to portray his idea of what the downfall of society will look like.

William Butler Yeats was considered to be one of the most important symbolists of the 20th Century. Believed to have been influenced by the French symbolist movement of the 19th Century, his poems incorporated symbols as a means of representing mystical, dream-like and abstract ideals. This was especially prevalent towards the latter part of his life when, inspired by his wife Georgiana Hyde-Lees, he developed a symbolic system which theorized movements through major cycles of history in his book A Vision (1925, 1937)[1]. “The Wild Swans at Coole” and “The Second Coming” are poems of Yeats’ which incorporate symbols, and will be discussed in this essay.