The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Yeats was born on June 13, 1865 in Dublin. However, he’s family moved to London after he was born. Yeats decided to move to London when he was about 14 years old. After Yeats returned to London he met famous writers like Oscar Wilde, Lionel Johnson and Maud Gonne, this encourage him to write about his Irish heritage. Even though Yeats lived in London for about 14 years “Yeats maintained his cultural roots/Irish nationality” (Poetry Foundation). In addition, this means that Yeats showed his love to where he came from by including Irish legends on his poems and plays.

Romantic influences paint a calm and peaceful portrait of Ireland through a tranquil tone. The mood is pleasant in the “nod of the head” and “polite meaningless words” as the reader deduces a positive outlook on society. It explicitly contrasts the repetition of “a terrible beauty is born” when reflecting on the violence in Ireland, shaping a personal response influenced by his perception of a struggle diminishing the essence of a pleasant aforementioned society. The stone to the “troubled living stream” emphasises Yeats’ support for the movement by placing

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.

Yeats works drew heavily on Irish mythology and history, he never fully embraced his Protestant past nor joined the majority or Ireland Roman Catholics but he devoted much of his life to the study in myriad other subjects. The Irish writer’s James O’ Grady and Sir William Ferguson were the most influential. Through his writing Yeats found his voice to speak up against the harsh nationalist policies of the time, his early dramatic works conveyed his respect for Irish legend and fascination with occult. Yeats mother was the first introduce him and his sisters to the Irish folktales he grew to love so much but little did you know that his brother jack and father was also an accomplished artist and they both helped William in his writing and it's the reason he found his own interest in the wonderful arts as he called them. In 1894 Yeats met friend and patron Lady Augusta Gregory and thus began their involvement with The Irish Literary Theatre which was founded in 1899 in Dublin. Along with literature, he also loved the theater and wrote several plays. He collaborated with the likes of Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore to establish the Irish Literary Theatre for the purpose of performing Irish and Celtic plays. As a dramatist, his successful works included ‘The Countess Cathleen’ (1892), ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ (1894) and ‘The King’s Threshold’

In the first stanza Yeats expresses his conflicting loathing and admiration for modernity through the juxtaposition of “vivid faces” and “grey houses”. This represents the possibilities that modernity can bring; the revitalising of the community or the destruction of tradition and age old energy already lost by the modifications in the city. The repetition of the phrase “A terrible beauty is born” in the first and fourth stanzas articulate this inner turmoil revolving around modernity. This oxymoronic declaration is emphasised throughout the text by Yeats’ confusion towards the rebellion and its necessity. The fourth stanza embodies this conflict, removing the previously represented idea that life in pre-rebellion Ireland was a “casual comedy”, alluding to an Elizabethan play where the characters were content. By asking the rhetoric questions “was it needless death” and “O when may [British rule] suffice?” Yeats parallels the unresolved contradiction of “terrible beauty”. However, this sensitive treatment of conflict allows the retainment of ambiguity and can be related to any change within life, hence allowing audiences to superimpose their own beliefs and ideas into the poem. Yeats continues to explore his aversion towards modernism in The Second Coming with the appointment of a new “gyre” standing as the symbol for a new age. The fear of

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

Yeats’ interest in rhythm was deeply tied to the notion of the sound of the earth and nature, and our relationship with the elements. He also had a profound interest and belief in faery, and the ways in which one could transcend material reality in order to reach that world which ran alongside the natural world. Yet Yeats, who was born in 1865 and died in 1939, lived through an era of immense scientific discovery and change. He lived in a world where, by and large, to believe in faery was to be irrational, and the industrial hum of engines prevailed over the quieter sounds of nature. In his earlier poetry, he conveys a certain reverence towards the ancient rhythms of language and nature, flying in the face of the frenetically busy London life he experienced as a young man. The bewitching beauty of the landscape of Sligo, steeped in folklore, were the true rhythms which brought on the ‘state of perhaps real trance’, allowing him to

By the beginning of 1925 Yeats's health was stabilized and “A Vision" had reached its final stages; finished. All of the trials and tribulation Yeats had faced gave Yeats a new outlook. "His language became more forceful; the Jesuit Father Peter Finlay was described by Yeats as a man of "monstrous discourtesy", and he lamented that, "It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our Bishops in their place in discussions requiring legislation"." (¶3 W.B. Yeats) In Yeats's old age his health wasn't the only thing failing, He was filled with distrust and despite to those of the Roman Catholics in Ireland. He steadily warned his associates, pleading: "If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be

Yeats was a confessional poet - that is to say, that he wrote his poetry directly from his own experiences. He was an idealist, with a purpose. This was to create Art for his own people - the Irish. But in so doing, he experienced considerable frustration and disillusionment. The tension between this ideal, and the reality is the basis of much of his writing. One central theme of his earlier poetry is the contrast

The effects of war as a theme in W.B.Yeats’s Easter 1916 and An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

As the reader looks deeper into the poem he/she might find alternate meanings behind the luring of the child. Yeats was a nationalist during a time of great political upheaval in Ireland. Nationalists wanted Ireland return to years before when Ireland was considered one nation. The Celtic images of the past could represent a desire to return to a time where Ireland was united. The freedom that the faery world allows is representative of the freedom that unity throughout Ireland allowed before religion and politics became large issues.

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

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, a dramatist, and a prose writer - one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century. (Yeats 1) His early poetry and drama acquired ideas from Irish fable and arcane study. (Eiermann 1) Yeats used the themes of nationalism, freedom from oppression, social division, and unity when writing about his country. Yeats, an Irish nationalist, used the three poems, “To Ireland in the Coming Times,” “September 1913” and “Easter 1916” which revealed an expression of his feelings about the War of Irish Independence through theme, mood and figurative language.

In the context of John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Wild Swans at Coole” by William Butler Yeats raises compelling dialogue with Keats’ piece, which suggests that Yeats, to some degree, draws inspiration from John Keats, in that his pose concerning the nightingale becomes a basis and “touchstone” for “The Wild Swans at Coole.” Aside from commonalities concerning avians, both poems share elements of Romanticism, melancholy, feelings of weariness, and other key ideas, images, and plots as “Ode to a Nightingale” and thus, “The Wild Swans at Coole” strengthens Keats’ initial ideas in a harmonic and resonant fashion using its own unique methods. As a response to Keatsian Romanticism, Yeats revises the ideas surrounding transcendence of

W.B. Yeat’s poem, Easter 1916, details the speaker’s feelings of Nationalism and heartache as he remembers those that he lost in the Easter Rising. As the speaker reflects on the time before the rising, he remembers not only how his life has changed but also how his friends and companions had transformed both in their character and in their state of being. The speaker uses metaphors to visualize the unchanging goal of Irish freedom and the coming of nights that bring about death and heartache. In this analysis, I will be focusing on the first and last stanzas of the poem. By comparing these two stanzas I will reflect on the literary devices used, as well as the differences of the speaker’s visuals from the beginning and end. Overall, the speaker