yeats poetry.pdf

7/27/2019 Yeats Poetry.pdf

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Rozi Khan Department of English Govt. Jahanzeb PG College Swat.

E-mail: [email protected]

Yeats’s Poetry Context

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865 to a chaotic, artistic family. His father, a portrait painter,

moved the family to London when Yeats was two, and William spent much of his childhood movingbetween the cold urban landscape of the metropolis and the congenial countryside of County Sligo,

Ireland, where his mother’s parents lived. An aesthete even as a boy, Yeats began writing verse early, and

published his first work in 1885. In 1889, Yeats met the Irish patriot, revolutionary, and beauty Maud

Gonne. He fell immediately in love with her, and remained so for the rest of his life; virtually every

reference to a beloved in Yeats’s poetry can be understood as a reference to Maud Gonne. Tragically,

Gonne did not return his love, and though they remained closely associated (she portrayed the lead role

in several of his plays), they were never romantically involved. Many years later, Yeats proposed to her

daughter—and was rejected again.

Yeats lived during a tumultuous time in Ireland, during the political rise and fall of Charles Stuart Parnell,

the Irish Revival, and the civil war. Partly because of his love for the politically active Maud Gonne, Yeats

devoted himself during the early part of his career to the Literary Revival and to Irish patriotism, seeking

to develop a new religious iconography based on Irish mythology. (Though he was of Protestant

parentage, Yeats played little part in the conflict between Catholics and Protestants that tore Ireland apart

during his lifetime.) He quickly rose to literary prominence, and helped to found the Abbey Theatre—one

of the most important cultural institutions in Ireland, at which he worked with such luminaries as Augusta

Gregory and the playwright John Synge. In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

One of the most remarkable facts about Yeats’s career as a poet is that he only reached his full powers

late in life, between the ages of 50 and 75. Indeed, after reaching his height, he sustained it up until the

very end, writing magnificent poems up until two weeks before his death. The normal expectation is that

a poet’s powers will fade after forty or fifty; Yeats defied that expectation and trumped it entirely, writing

most of his greatest poems—from the crushing power of The Tower to the eerie mysticism of the Last Poems—in the years after he won the Nobel Prize, a testament to the force and commitment with which

he devoted himself to transforming his inner life into poetry. Because his work straddles the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries, Yeats is stylistically quite a unique poet; his early work seems curiously modern

for the nineteenth century, and his late work often seems curiously un-modern for the 1930s. But Yeats

wrote great poems in every decade of his life, and his influence has towered over the past six decades;

today, he is generally regarded as the greatest poet of the twentieth century.

Analysis

Yeats is the greatest poet in the history of Ireland and probably the greatest poet to write in English during

the twentieth century; his themes, images, symbols, metaphors, and poetic sensibilities encompass the

breadth of his personal experience, as well as his nation’s experience during one of its most troubledtimes. Yeats’s great poetic project was to reify his own life—his thoughts, feelings, speculations,

conclusions, dreams—into poetry: to render all of himself into art, but not in a merely confessional or

autobiographical manner; he was not interested in the common-place. (The poet, Yeats famously

remarked, is not the man who sits down to breakfast in the morning.) His elaborate iconography takes

elements from Irish mythology, Greek mythology, nineteenth-century occultism (which Yeats dabbled in

with Madame Blavatsky and the Society of the Golden Dawn), English literature, Byzantine art, European

politics, and Christian imagery, all wound together and informed with his own experience and interpretive

understanding.

His thematic focus could be sweepingly grand: in the 1920s and ’30s he even concocted a mystical theory

of the universe, which explained history, imagination, and mythology in light of an occult set of symbols,

and which he laid out in his book A Vision (usually considered important today only for the light it shedson some of his poems). However, in his greatest poems, he mitigates this grandiosity with a focus on his

own deep feeling. Yeats’s own experience is never far from his poems, even when they seem obscurely

imagistic or theoretically abstract, and the veil of obscurity and abstraction is often lifted once one gains

an understanding of how the poet’s lived experiences relate to the poem in question.



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No poet of the twentieth century more persuasively imposed his personal experience onto history by way

of his art; and no poet more successfully plumbed the truths contained within his “deep heart’s core,”

even when they threatened to render his poetry clichéd or ridiculous. His integrity and passionate

commitment to work according to his own vision protect his poems from all such accusations. To

contemporary readers, Yeats can seem baffling; he was opposed to the age of science, progress,

democracy, and modernization, and his occultist and mythological answers to those problems can seem

horribly anachronistic for a poet who died barely sixty years ago. But Yeats’s goal is always to arrive at

personal truth; and in that sense, despite his profound individuality, he remains one of the most universal

writers ever to have lived.

Themes, Motifs and Symbols

Themes

The Relationship between Art and Politics

Yeats believed that art and politics were intrinsically linked and used his writing to express his attitudes

toward Irish politics, as well as to educate his readers about Irish cultural history. From an early age, Yeatsfelt a deep connection to Ireland and his national identity, and he thought that British rule negatively

impacted Irish politics and social life. His early compilation of folklore sought to teach a literary history

that had been suppressed by British rule, and his early poems were odes to the beauty and mystery of the

Irish countryside. This work frequently integrated references to myths and mythic figures, including Oisin

and Cuchulain. As Yeats became more involved in Irish politics—through his relationships with the Irish

National Theatre, the Irish Literary Society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and Maud Gonne—his

poems increasingly resembled political manifestos. Yeats wrote numerous poems about Ireland’s

involvement in World War I (“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” [1919], “A Meditation in Time of War”

[1921]), Irish nationalists and political activists (“On a Political Prisoner” [1921], “In Memory of Eva Gore

Booth and Con Markiewicz” [1933]), and the Easter Rebellion (“Easter 1916” [1916]). Yeats believed that

art could serve a political function: poems could both critique and comment on political events, as well as

educate and inform a population.

The Impact of Fate and the Divine on History

Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the development of a unique spiritual and philosophical system that

emphasized the role of fate and historical determinism, or the belief that events have been preordained.

Yeats had rejected Christianity early in his life, but his lifelong study of mythology, Theosophy, spiritualism,

philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound interest in the divine and how it interacts with

humanity. Over the course of his life, he created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of

interlocking gyres (similar to spiral cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul.

Yeats believed that history was determined by fate and that fate revealed its plan in moments when the

human and divine interact. A tone of historically determined inevitability permeates his poems,particularly in descriptions of situations of human and divine interaction. The divine takes on many forms

in Yeats’s poetry, sometimes literally (“Leda and the Swan” [1923]), sometimes abstractly (“The Second

Coming” [1919]). In other poems, the divine is only gestured to (as in the sense of the divine in the

Byzantine mosaics in “Sailing to Byzantium” [1926]). No matter what shape it takes, the divine signals the

role of fate in determining the course of history.

The Transition from Romanticism to Modernism

Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet.

When he began publishing poetry in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical, romantic style, and they focused

on love, longing and loss, and Irish myths. His early writing follows the conventions of romantic verse,

utilizing familiar rhyme schemes, metric patterns, and poetic structures. Although it is lighter than his laterwritings, his early poetry is still sophisticated and accomplished. Several factors contributed to his poetic

evolution: his interest in mysticism and the occult led him to explore spiritually and philosophically

complex subjects. Yeats’s frustrated romantic relationship with Maud Gonne caused the starry-eyed

romantic idealism of his early work to become more knowing and cynical. Additionally, his concern with



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Irish subjects evolved as he became more closely connected to nationalist political causes. As a result,

Yeats shifted his focus from myth and folklore to contemporary politics, often linking the two to make

potent statements that reflected political agitation and turbulence in Ireland and abroad. Finally, and most

significantly, Yeats’s connection with the changing face of literary culture in the early twentieth century

led him to pick up some of the styles and conventions of the modernist poets. The modernists

experimented with verse forms, aggressively engaged with contemporary politics, challenged poetic

conventions and the literary tradition at large, and rejected the notion that poetry should simply be lyrical

and beautiful. These influences caused his poetry to become darker, edgier, and more concise. Although

he never abandoned the verse forms that provided the sounds and rhythms of his earlier poetry, there is

still a noticeable shift in style and tone over the course of his career.

Motifs

Irish Nationalism and Politics

Throughout his literary career, Yeats incorporated distinctly Irish themes and issues into his work. He used

his writing as a tool to comment on Irish politics and the home rule movement and to educate and inform

people about Irish history and culture. Yeats also used the backdrop of the Irish countryside to retellstories and legends from Irish folklore. As he became increasingly involved in nationalist politics, his

poems took on a patriotic tone. Yeats addressed Irish politics in a variety of ways: sometimes his

statements are explicit political commentary, as in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” in which he

addresses the hypocrisy of the British use of Irish soldiers in World War I. Such poems as “Easter 1916”

and “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz” address individuals and events connected to

Irish nationalist politics, while “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan” subtly include the idea of

Irish nationalism. In these poems, a sense of cultural crisis and conflict seeps through, even though the

poems are not explicitly about Ireland. By using images of chaos, disorder, and war, Yeats engaged in an

understated commentary on the political situations in Ireland and abroad. Yeats’s active participation in

Irish politics informed his poetry, and he used his work to further comment on the nationalist issues of his

day.

Mysticism and the Occult

Yeats had a deep fascination with mysticism and the occult, and his poetry is infused with a sense of the

otherworldly, the spiritual, and the unknown. His interest in the occult began with his study of

Theosophy as a young man and expanded and developed through his participation in the Hermetic Order

of the Golden Dawn, a mystical secret society. Mysticism figures prominently in Yeats’s discussion of the

reincarnation of the soul, as well as in his philosophical model of the conical gyres used to explain the

journey of the soul, the passage of time, and the guiding hand of fate. Mysticism and the occult occur

again and again in Yeats’s poetry, most explicitly in “The Second Coming” but also in poems such as “Sailing

to Byzantium” and “The Magi” (1916). The rejection of Christian principles in favor of a more supernatural

approach to spirituality creates a unique flavor in Yeats’s poetry that impacts his discussion of history,politics, and love.

Irish Myth and Folklore

Yeats’s participation in the Irish political system had origins in his interest in Irish myth and folklore. Irish

myth and folklore had been suppressed by church doctrine and British control of the school system. Yeats

used his poetry as a tool for re-educating the Irish population about their heritage and as a strategy for

developing Irish nationalism. He retold entire folktales in epic poems and plays, such as The Wanderings

of Oisin (1889) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939), and used fragments of stories in shorter poems, such

as “The Stolen Child” (1886), which retells a parable of fairies luring a child away from his home, and

“Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea” (1925), which recounts part of an epic where the Irish folk hero Cuchulain

battles his long-lost son by at the edge of the sea. Other poems deal with subjects, images, and themesculled from folklore. In “Who Goes with Fergus?” (1893) Yeats imagines a meeting with the exiled

wandering king of Irish legend, while “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899) captures the experiences

of the lovelorn god Aengus as he searches for the beautiful maiden seen in his dreams. Most important,

Yeats infused his poetry with a rich sense of Irish culture. Even poems that do not deal explicitly with



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subjects from myth retain powerful tinges of indigenous Irish culture. Yeats often borrowed word

selection, verse form, and patterns of imagery directly from traditional Irish myth and folklore.

Symbols

The Gyre

The gyre, a circular or conical shape, appears frequently in Yeats’s poems and was developed as part of

the philosophical system outlined in his book A Vision. At first, Yeats used the phases of the moon to

articulate his belief that history was structured in terms of ages, but he later settled upon the gyre as a

more useful model. He chose the image of interlocking gyres—visually represented as two intersecting

conical spirals—to symbolize his philosophical belief that all things could be described in terms of cycles

and patterns. The soul (or the civilization, the age, and so on) would move from the smallest point of the

spiral to the largest before moving along to the other gyre. Although this is a difficult concept to grasp

abstractly, the image makes sense when applied to the waxing and waning of a particular historical age

or the evolution of a human life from youth to adulthood to old age. The symbol of the interlocking gyres

reveals Yeats’s belief in fate and historical determinism as well as his spiritual attitudes toward the

development of the soul, since creatures and events must evolve according to the conical shape. With theimage of the gyre, Yeats created a shorthand reference in his poetry that stood for his entire philosophy

of history and spirituality.

The Swan

Swans are a common symbol in poetry, often used to depict idealized nature. Yeats employs this

convention in “The Wild Swans at Coole” (1919), in which the regal birds represent an unchanging,

flawless ideal. In “Leda and the Swan,” Yeats rewrites the Greek myth of Zeus and Leda to comment on

fate and historical inevitability: Zeus disguises himself as a swan to rape the unsuspecting Leda. In this

poem, the bird is fearsome and destructive, and it possesses a divine power that violates Leda and initiates

the dire consequences of war and devastation depicted in the final lines. Even though Yeats clearly states

that the swan is the god Zeus, he also emphasizes the physicality of the swan: the beating wings, the dark

webbed feet, the long neck and beak. Through this description of its physical characteristics, the swan

becomes a violent divine force. By rendering a well-known poetic symbol as violent and terrifying rather

than idealized and beautiful, Yeats manipulates poetic conventions, an act of literary modernism, and

adds to the power of the poem.

The Great Beast

Yeats employs the figure of a great beast—a horrific, violent animal—to embody difficult abstract

concepts. The great beast as a symbol comes from Christian iconography, in which it represents evil and

darkness. In “The Second Coming,” the great beast emerges from the Spiritus Mundi, or soul of the

universe, to function as the primary image of destruction in the poem. Yeats describes the onset of apocalyptic events in which the “blood-dimmed tide is loosed” and the “ceremony of innocence is

drowned” as the world enters a new age and falls apart as a result of the widening of the historical gyres.

The speaker predicts the arrival of the Second Coming, and this prediction summons a “vast image” of a

frightening monster pulled from the collective consciousness of the world. Yeats modifies the well-known

image of the sphinx to embody the poem’s vision of the climactic coming. By rendering the terrifying

prospect of disruption and change into an easily imagined horrifying monster, Yeats makes an abstract

fear become tangible and real. The great beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, where it will evolve

into a second Christ (or anti-Christ) figure for the dark new age. In this way, Yeats uses distinct, concrete

imagery to symbolize complex ideas about the state of the modern world.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

Summary

The poet declares that he will arise and go to Innisfree, where he will build a small cabin “of clay and

wattles made.” There, he will have nine bean-rows and a beehive, and live alone in the glade loud with



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the sound of bees (“the bee-loud glade”). He says that he will have peace there, for peace drops from “the

veils of morning to where the cricket sings.” Midnight there is a glimmer, and noon is a purple glow, and

evening is full of linnet’s wings. He declares again that he will arise and go, for always, night and day, he

hears the lake water lapping “with low sounds by the shore.” While he stands in the city, “on the roadway,

or on the pavements grey,” he hears the sound within himself, “in the deep heart’s core.”

Form

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is written mostly in hexameter, with six stresses in each line, in a loosely iambic

pattern. The last line of each four-line stanza shortens the line to tetrameter, with only four stresses: “And

live alone in the bee-loud glade.” Each of the three stanzas has the same ABAB rhyme scheme. Formally,

this poem is somewhat unusual for Yeats: he rarely worked with hexameter, and every rhyme in the poem

is a full rhyme; there is no sign of the half-rhymes Yeats often prefers in his later work.

Commentary

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” published in Yeats’s second book of poems, 1893’s The Rose, is one of his first

great poems, and one of his most enduring. The tranquil, hypnotic hexameters recreate the rhythmic

pulse of the tide. The simple imagery of the quiet life the speaker longs to lead, as he enumerates each of

its qualities, lulls the reader into his idyllic fantasy, until the penultimate line jolts the speaker—and the

reader—back into the reality of his drab urban existence: “While I stand on the roadway, or on the

pavements grey.” The final line—“I hear it in the deep heart’s core”—is a crucial statement for Yeats, not

only in this poem but also in his career as a whole. The implication that the truths of the “deep heart’s

core” are essential to life is one that would preoccupy Yeats for the rest of his career as a poet; the struggle

to remain true to the deep heart’s core may be thought of as Yeats’s primary undertaking as a poet.

“Adam’s Curse”

Summary

Addressing his beloved, the speaker remembers sitting with her and “that beautiful mild woman, your

close friend” at the end of summer, discussing poetry. He remarked then that a line of poetry may take

hours to write, but if it does not seem the thought of a single moment, the poet’s work has been useless.

The poet said that it would be better to “scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones / Like an old pauper,

in all kinds of weather,” for to write poetry is a task harder than these, yet less appreciated by the

“bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen” of the world.

The “beautiful mild woman”—whose voice, the speaker notes, is so sweet and low it will cause many men

heartache—replied that to be born a woman is to know that one must work at being beautiful, even

though that kind of work is not discussed at school. The speaker answered by saying that since the fall of

Adam, every fine thing has required “labouring.” He said that there have been lovers who spent time

learning “precedents out of beautiful old books,” but now such study seems “an idle trade enough.”

At the mention of love, the speaker recalls, the group grew quiet, watching “the last embers of daylight

die.” In the blue-green sky the moon rose, looking worn as a shell “washed by time’s waters as they rose

and fell / About the stars and broke in days and years.” The speaker says that he spoke only for the ears

of his beloved, that she was beautiful, and that he strove to love her “in the old high way of love.” It had

all seemed happy, he says, “and yet we’d grown / As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.”

Form

“Adam’s Curse” is written in heroic couplets, which is a name used to describe rhyming couplets in iambic

pentameter. Some of the rhymes are full (years/ears) and some are only partial (clergymen/thereupon).

Commentary

“Adam’s Curse” is an extraordinary poem; though it was written early in Yeats’s career (appearing in his

1904 collection In the Seven Woods), and though its stylistic simplicity is somewhat atypical for Yeats, it



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easily ranks among his best and most moving work. Within an emotional recollection of an evening spent

with his beloved and her friend, Yeats frames a philosophical argument: that because of the curse of labor

that God placed upon Adam when He expelled him from the Garden of Eden, every worthwhile human

achievement (particularly those aimed at achieving beauty, whether in poetry, physical appearance, or

love) requires hard work. The simple, speech-like rhythms of the iambic pentameter fulfill the poet’s

dictate that a poetic line should seem “but a moment’s thought,” and the bittersweet emotional tone

appears wholly organic, a natural result of the recollection. The speaker loves the woman to whom the

poem is addressed, and speaks “only for [her] ears”; but though the scene seems happy, their hearts are

as weary as shells worn by the waters of time.

Behind the natural, unsophisticated feel of the poem, of course, lies a great deal of hard work and

structure—just as the poem’s speaker says must be true of poetry generally. (One of the most charming

aspects of this poem is its mirroring of the aesthetic principles laid out by the speaker in the first stanza.)

The discussion of work and beauty is divided into three progressive parts: the speaker’s claims about

poetry, the friend’s claims about physical beauty, and the speaker’s claims about love. This last claim

affords Yeats the chance both to hush the trio and to soften the mood of the poem, and the speaker looks

outward to the rising moon, which becomes a metaphor for the effects of time on the human heart, a

weariness presumably compounded by the labor of living “since Adam’s fall.”

“The Wild Swans at Coole”

Summary

With the trees “in their autumn beauty,” the speaker walks down the dry woodland paths to the water,

which mirrors the still October twilight of the sky. Upon the water float “nine-and-fifty swans.” The

speaker says that nineteen years have passed since he first came to the water and counted the swans;

that first time, before he had “well finished,” he saw the swans mount up into the sky and scatter,

“whelling in great broken rings / Upon their clamorous wings.” The speaker says that his heart is sore, for

after nineteen autumns of watching and being cheered by the swans, he finds that everything in his life

has changed. The swans, though, are still unwearied, and they paddle by in the water or fly by in the airin pairs, “lover by lover.” Their hearts, the speaker says, “have not grown cold,” and wherever they go

they are attended by “passion or conquest.” But now, as they drift over the still water, they are

“Mysterious, beautiful,” and the speaker wonders where they will build their nests, and by what lake’s

edge or pool they will “delight men’s eyes,” when he awakes one morning to find that they have flown

away.

Form

The Wild Swans at Coole” is written in a very regular stanza form: five six-line stanzas, each written in a

roughly iambic meter, with the first and third lines in tetrameter, the second, fourth, and sixth lines in

trimeter, and the fifth line in pentameter, so that the pattern of stressed syllables in each stanza is 434353.

The rhyme scheme in each stanza is ABCBDD.

Commentary

One of the most unusual features of Yeats’s poetic career is the fact that the poet came into his greatest

powers only as he neared old age; whereas many poets fade after the first burst of youth, Yeats continued

to grow more confident and more innovative with his writing until almost the day he died. Though he was

a famous and successful writer in his youth, his poetic reputation today is founded almost solely on poems

written after he was fifty. He is thus the great poet of old age, writing honestly and with astonishing force

about the pain of time’s passage and feeling that the ageless heart was “fastened to a dying animal,” as

he wrote in “Sailing to Byzantium.” The great struggle that enlivens many of Yeats’s best poems is the

struggle to uphold the integrity of the soul, and to preserve the mind’s connection to the “deep heart’score,” despite physical decay and the pain of memory.

“The Wild Swans at Coole,” part of the 1919 collection of the same name, is one of Yeats’s earliest and

most moving testaments to the heart-ache of living in a time when “all’s changed.” (And when Yeats says



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“All’s changed, changed utterly” in the fifteen years since he first saw the swans, he means it—the First

World War and the Irish civil war both occurred during these years.) The simple narrative of the poem,

recounting the poet’s trips to the lake at Augusta Gregory’s Coole Park residence to count the swans on

the water, is given its solemn serenity by the beautiful nature imagery of the early stanzas, the plaintive

tone of the poet, and the carefully constructed poetic stanza—the two trimeter lines, which give the poet

an opportunity to utter short, heartfelt statements before a long silence ensured by the short line (“Their

hearts have not grown old...”). The speaker, caught up in the gentle pain of personal memory, contrasts

sharply with the swans, which are treated as symbols of the essential: their hearts have not grown old;

they are still attended by passion and conquest.

“An Irish Airman foresees his Death”

Summary

The speaker, an Irish airman fighting in World War I, declares that he knows he will die fighting among the

clouds. He says that he does not hate those he fights, nor love those he guards. His country is “Kiltartan’s

Cross,” his countrymen “Kiltartan’s poor.” He says that no outcome in the war will make their lives worse

or better than before the war began. He says that he did not decide to fight because of a law or a senseof duty, nor because of “public men” or “cheering crowds.” Rather, “a lonely impulse of delight” drove

him to “this tumult in the clouds.” He says that he weighed his life in his mind, and found that “The years

to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind.”

Form

This short sixteen-line poem has a very simple structure: lines metered in iambic tetrameter, and four

grouped “quatrains” of alternating rhymes: ABABCDCDEFEFGHGH, or four repetitions of the basic ABAB

scheme utilizing different rhymes.

Commentary

This simple poem is one of Yeats’s most explicit statements about the First World War, and illustrates

both his active political consciousness (“Those I fight I do not hate, / Those I guard I do not love”) and his

increasing propensity for a kind of hard-edged mystical rapture (the airman was driven to the clouds by

“A lonely impulse of delight”). The poem, which, like flying, emphasizes balance, essentially enacts a kind

of accounting, whereby the airman lists every factor weighing upon his situation and his vision of death,

and rejects every possible factor he believes to be false: he does not hate or love his enemies or his allies,

his country will neither be benefited nor hurt by any outcome of the war, he does not fight for political or

moral motives but because of his “impulse of delight”; his past life seems a waste, his future life seems

that it would be a waste, and his death will balance his life. Complementing this kind of tragic arithmetic

is the neatly balanced structure of the poem, with its cycles of alternating rhymes and its clipped, stoical

meter.

“The Second Coming”

Summary

The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear

the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The blood-

dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the

speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”

Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No

sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi,

or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and

the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds

reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty



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centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what

“rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Form

“The Second Coming” is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the

exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. Therhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only

coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”

Commentary

Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of

Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and

difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem could paraphrase its

meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions

present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions

that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new

messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward

Bethlehem. This brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly complicated; but the

question of what it should signify to a reader is another story entirely.

Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that he described in his book A

Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in part

from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system. The

system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance—except for the effect that it had on

his poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision

centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of

the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this

image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process,and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and

could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development).

“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem

appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an

apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving

along the inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own

notes:

The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by

the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest

contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre...

In other words, the world’s trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy, and heterogeneity is now

coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer;

the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the

contrary inner gyre—which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the science

and democracy of the outer gyre. The “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this

new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.

This seems quite silly as philosophy or prophecy (particularly in light of the fact that it has not come true

as yet). But as poetry, and understood more broadly than as a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of

A Vision, “The Second Coming” is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history,and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. The poem may not have the

thematic relevance of Yeats’s best work, and may not be a poem with which many people can personally

identify; but the aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to ensure its value

and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.



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The Second Coming Reader’s Notes

The Second Coming has many biblical references within the poem in my point of view. It talks about ideas

from the book of revelations. In revelations an angel "opened an abyss"(Revelation 9:2) in which Yeats

describes a "widening gyre"- a deep and bottomless pit. The bible also describes the world in its last days

filled with: "abomination filled with desolation)". Yeats also describes a world filled with chaos: "falcon

cannot hear the falconer, anarchy, innocence drowned, best lack all conviction, blood- dimmed tide, and

passionate intensity". The bible also refers to two witnesses, men, who "have power to turn waters into

blood"(Rev. 11:6) and "a third of the sea turned to blood" (Rev. 8: Water turned into blood was also

mentioned in Exodus as one of Gods punishments towards the Egyptians. This correlates what Yeats

describes as a "blood-dimmed tide" as punishment from God, a mass number of death. Yeats also

mentions the sun to be "blank and pitiless" which in the bible says" the sun turned black like a sackcloth

made of goat hair" (Rev.6:12). "The Second Coming" first makes you believe it is Jesus second time on

Earth, but later in the poem it refers to the "beast". The beast is actually Satan, or the devil. In revelations

he is "the great dragon...that ancient serpent"(Rev. 12:9). A rocking cradle signifies something to be born,

the beast is awaiting not Jesus return but the birth of the anti-Christ in Bethlehem. "Then i saw another

beast, coming out the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon."(Rev. 13:11). Thesecond beast or anti-Christ , is to be born in Bethlehem because the anti-Christ mimicks Jesus himself in

"performing great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to Earth in full view

of Earth...(and) worship the beast and his image" (Rev. 13,11).

“Sailing to Byzantium”

Summary

The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is “no country for old men”: it is full of

youth and life, with the young lying in one another’s arms, birds singing in the trees, and fish swimming

in the waters. There, “all summer long” the world rings with the “sensual music” that makes the young

neglect the old, whom the speaker describes as “Monuments of unageing intellect.”

An old man, the speaker says, is a “paltry thing,” merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his soul can

clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how to sing is to study “monuments of its

own magnificence.” Therefore, the speaker has “sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium.”

The speaker addresses the sages “standing in God’s holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall,” and asks

them to be his soul’s “singing-masters.” He hopes they will consume his heart away, for his heart “knows

not what it is”—it is “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal,” and the speaker wishes to be

gathered “Into the artifice of eternity.”

The speaker says that once he has been taken out of the natural world, he will no longer take his “bodily

form” from any “natural thing,” but rather will fashion himself as a singing bird made of hammered gold,

such as Grecian goldsmiths make “To keep a drowsy Emperor awake,” or set upon a tree of gold “to sing

/ To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Or what is past, or passing, or to come.”

Form

The four eight-line stanzas of “Sailing to Byzantium” take a very old verse form: they are metered in iambic

pentameter, and rhymed ABABABCC, two trios of alternating rhyme followed by a couplet.

Commentary

“Sailing to Byzantium” is one of Yeats’s most inspired works, and one of the greatest poems of the

twentieth century. Written in 1926 and included in Yeats’s greatest single collection, 1928’s The Tower,

“Sailing to Byzantium” is Yeats’s definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and

spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is “fastened to a dying animal”

(the body). Yeats’s solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages

in the city’s famous gold mosaics (completed mainly during the sixth and seventh centuries) could become

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/yeats/notes/231

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the “singing-masters” of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body

into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could exist in “the artifice of eternity.”

In the astonishing final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again

appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing

of the past (“what is past”), the present (that which is “passing”), and the future (that which is “to come”).

A fascination with the artificial as superior to the natural is one of Yeats’s most prevalent themes. In amuch earlier poem, 1899’s “The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart,” the speaker expresses a longing to

re-make the world “in a casket of gold” and thereby eliminate its ugliness and imperfection. Later, in

1914’s “The Dolls,” the speaker writes of a group of dolls on a shelf, disgusted by the sight of a human

baby. In each case, the artificial (the golden casket, the beautiful doll, the golden bird) is seen as perfect

and unchanging, while the natural (the world, the human baby, the speaker’s body) is prone to ugliness

and decay. What is more, the speaker sees deep spiritual truth (rather than simply aesthetic escape) in

his assumption of artificiality; he wishes his soul to learn to sing, and transforming into a golden bird is

the way to make it capable of doing so.

“Sailing to Byzantium” is an endlessly interpretable poem, and suggests endlessly fascinating comparisons

with other important poems—poems of travel, poems of age, poems of nature, poems featuring birds as

symbols. (One of the most interesting is surely Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” to which this poem is in

many ways a rebuttal: Keats writes of his nightingale, “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No

hungry generations tread thee down”; Yeats, in the first stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium,” refers to “birds

in the trees” as “those dying generations.”) It is important to note that the poem is not autobiographical;

Yeats did not travel to Byzantium (which was renamed Constantinople in the fourth century A.D., and

later renamed Istanbul), but he did argue that, in the sixth century, it offered the ideal environment for

the artist. The poem is about an imaginative journey, not an actual one.

“Leda and the Swan”

Summary

The speaker retells a story from Greek mythology, the rape of the girl Leda by the god Zeus, who had

assumed the form of a swan. Leda felt a sudden blow, with the “great wings” of the swan still beating

above her. Her thighs were caressed by “the dark webs,” and the nape of her neck was caught in his bill;

he held “her helpless breast upon his breast.” How, the speaker asks, could Leda’s “terrified vague fingers”

push the feathered glory of the swan from between her thighs? And how could her body help but feel

“the strange heart beating where it lies”? A shudder in the loins engenders “The broken wall, the burning

roof and tower, and Agamemnon dead.” The speaker wonders whether Leda, caught up by the swan and

“mastered by the brute blood of the air,” assumed his knowledge as well as his power “Before the

indifferent beak could let her drop.”

Form

“Leda and the Swan” is a sonnet, a traditional fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter. The structure of

this sonnet is Petrarchan with a clear separation between the first eight lines (the “octave”) and the final

six (the “sestet”), the dividing line being the moment of ejaculation—the “shudder in the loins.” The rhyme

scheme of the sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFGEFG.

Commentary

Like “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan” describes a moment that represented a change of era in

Yeats’s historical model of gyres, which he offers in A Vision, his mystical theory of the universe. But where

“The Second Coming” represents (in Yeats’s conception) the end of modern history, “Leda and the Swan”

represents something like its beginning; as Yeats understands it, the “history” of Leda is that, raped by thegod Zeus in the form of a swan, she laid eggs, which hatched into Clytemnestra and Helen and the war-

gods Castor and Polydeuces—and thereby brought about the Trojan War (“The broken wall, the burning

roof and tower, / And Agamemnon dead”). The details of the story of the Trojan War are quite elaborate:

briefly, the Greek Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, was kidnapped by the Trojans, so the



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Greeks besieged the city of Troy; after the war, Clytemnestra, the wife of the Greek leader Agamemnon,

had her husband murdered. Here, however, it is important to know only the war’s lasting impact: it

brought about the end of the ancient mythological era and the birth of modern history.

Also like “The Second Coming,” “Leda and the Swan” is valuable more for its powerful and evocative

language—which manages to imagine vividly such a bizarre phenomenon as a girl’s rape by a massive

swan—than for its place in Yeats’s occult history of the world. As an aesthe tic experience, the sonnet isremarkable; Yeats combines words indicating powerful action (sudden blow, beating, staggering, beating,

shudder, mastered, burning, mastered) with adjectives and descriptive words that indicate Leda’s

weakness and helplessness (caressed, helpless, terrified, vague, loosening), thus increasing the sensory

impact of the poem.

“Byzantium”

Summary

At night in the city of Byzantium, “The unpurged images of day recede.” The drunken soldiers of the

Emperor are asleep, and the song of night-walkers fades after the great cathedral gong. The “starlit” or

“moonlit dome,” the speaker says, disdains all that is human—”All mere complexities, / The fury and the

mire of human veins.” The speaker says that before him floats an image—a man or a shade, but more a

shade than a man, and still more simply “an image.” The speaker hails this “superhuman” image, calling

it “death-in-life and life-in-death.” A golden bird sits on a golden tree, which the speaker says is a

“miracle”; it sings aloud, and scorns the “common bird or petal / And all complexities of mire or blood.”

At midnight, the speaker says, the images of flames flit across the Emperor’s pavement, though they are

not fed by wood or steel, nor disturbed by storms. Here, “blood-begotten spirits come,” and die “into a

dance, / An agony of trance, / An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve,” leaving behind all the

complexities and furies of life. Riding the backs of dolphins, spirit after spirit arrives, the flood broken on

“the golden smithies of the Emperor.” The marbles of the dancing floor break the “bitter furies of

complexity,” the storms of images that beget more images, “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.”

Form

The pronounced differences in “Byzantium’s line lengths make its stanzas appear very haphazard;

however, they are actually quite regular: each stanza constitutes eight lines, and each rhymes AABBCDDC.

Metrically, each is quite complicated; the lines are loosely iambic, with the first, second, third, fifth, and

eighth lines in pentameter, the fourth line in tetrameter, and the sixth and seventh line in trimeter, so

that the pattern of line-stresses in each stanza is 55545335.

Commentary

We have read Yeats’s account of “Sailing to Byzantium”; now he has arrived at the city itself, and is ableto describe it. In “Sailing to Byzantium” the speaker stated his desire to be “out of nature” and to assume

the form of a golden bird; in “Byzantium,” the bird appears, and scores of dead spirits arrive on the backs

of dolphins, to be forged into “the artifice of eternity”—ghostlike images with no physical presence (“a

flame that cannot singe a sleeve”). The narrative and imagistic arrangement of this poem is highly

ambiguous and complicated; it is unclear whether Yeats intends the poem to be a register of symbols or

an actual mythological statement. (In classical mythology, dolphins often carry the dead to their final

resting-place.)

In any event, we see here the same preference for the artificial above the actualthat appeared in “Sailing

to Byzantium”; only now the speaker has encountered actual creatures that exist “in the artifice of

eternity”—most notably the golden bird of stanza three. But the preference is now tinged with ambiguity:

the bird looks down upon “common bird or petal,” but it does so not out of existential necessity, butrather because it has been coerced into doing so, as it were—“by the moon embittered.” The speaker’s

demonstrated preoccupation with “fresh images” has led some critics to conclude that the poem is really

an allegory of the process by which fantasies are rendered into art, images arriving from the “dolphin-

torn, the gong-tormented sea,” then being made into permanent artifacts by “the golden smithies of the



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Emperor.” It is impossible to say whether this is all or part of Yeats’s intention, and it is difficult to see how

the prevalent symbols of the afterlife connect thematically to the topic of images (how could images be

dead?). For all its difficulty and almost unfixed quality of meaning—the poem is difficult to place even

within the context of A Vision—the intriguing imagery and sensual language of the poem are tokens of its

power; simply as the evocation of a fascinating imaginary scene, “Byzantium” is unmatched in all of Yeats.

“The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

Summary

The speaker describes searching in vain for a poetic theme: he says that he had tried to find one for “six

weeks or so,” but had been unable to do so. He thinks that perhaps, now that he is “but a broken man,”

he will have to be satisfied with writing about his heart, although for his entire life (“Winter and summer

till old age began”) he had played with elaborate, showy poetic themes that paraded like “circus animals”:

“Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, / Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.”

What can he do, he wonders, but list his old themes in the absence of a new one? He remembers writing

of a “sea-rider” named Oisin, who traveled through “three enchanted islands”; but the speaker says that

as he wrote about Oisin, he was secretly “starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.” He remembers writing

a play called “The Countess Cathleen,” about a “pity-crazed” woman who gave her soul away; but the

speaker says that the dream inspired by a woman who was forced to destroy her own soul “had all my

thought and love.” He remembers writing of the hero Cuchulain’s battle with the sea while the Fool and

the Blind Man “stole the bread”; but even then, he was enchanted by the dream—the idea of “Character

isolated by a deed / To engross the present and dominate memory.” He says that he loved the “players

and painted stage,” and not the things they symbolized.

The speaker says that those images were masterful because they were complete. He says that they grew

in pure mind, and asks out of what they began. He answers his own question: they issued from “Old

kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, / Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut / Who keeps the till.”

Now that his “ladder” is gone, the speaker says, he must lie down “where all the ladders start / In the foulrag and bone shop of the heart.”

Form

The five stanzas of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” are written in the same form as the stanzas of “Sailing

to Byzantium”: in lines in iambic pentameter, rhymed ABABABCC. The poem is subdivided into three

numerical sections (I, II, and III), with the three middle stanzas falling in section II; section I contains only

the first stanza, and section III contains only the last.

Commentary

“The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” one of the last poems Yeats completed before his death in 1939, findshim looking back over his poetic career, reinterpreting his past work and his motivations for writing it, and

searching for the truths that remain when all the vanities and illusions of life have been stripped away by

the decay of age and the corruptions of time. “At last,” the speaker writes, he is “but a broken man,” and

his poetic faculties have abandoned him. Sickened by what he perceives to be the gaudiness and illusion

of his past work, he thinks of his former poetic creations as “circus animals” that have been “on show” his

entire life, and which have now deserted him.

In the three stanzas of the second section, Yeats looks back at three specific works from earlier in his life,

and questions their honesty and his commitment to them. In the first stanza of section II, he looks back at

The Wanderings of Oisin, a long narrative poem from 1889 in which the hero Oisin follows his beloved

Niamh across a trio of magical islands; Yeats claims that his real motive for writing the poem was not a

noble one—that he was simply, pathetically “starved” for “the bosom of his fairy bride.” In the secondstanza of the section, he looks at a play entitled The Countess Cathleen, which was first performed (with

Maude Gonne in the starring role) in 1899; in the play, the countess sells her soul to the devil to feed her

starving subjects; Yeats says that his real motive for writing the play was the “dream” inspired by his belief

that his “dear” “must her own soul destroy.” In the third stanza, Yeats looks back at another play, this one



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entitled On Bailee’s Strand, and featuring a scene in which the mythological Irish hero Cuchulain, having

unknowingly killed his son in battle, commits suicide by attempting to battle the ocean; at the same time,

two characters called the Fool and the Blind Man rob the ovens. Yeats says that in writing this play he was

preoccupied with the theater and with the idea that character could be “isolated” by a single deed— but

not with the actual symbols of the play itself.

In the final stanza of the poem, Yeats takes a hard look at his “masterful” imagery, and realizes that thoughit seemed to grow in “pure mind,” it actually began in the ugly, common experiences of everyday life,

which work upon the mind. So in a sense, Cuchulain stemmed from “a mound of refuse or the sweepings

of a street.” Wearily but with resolve, Yeats states that he must lie down in the place where poetry and

imagery begin: “In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” The stark physicality of the final line of Yeats’s

last great formulation of a poetic credo contrasts shockingly with his first one, in “The Lake Isle of

Innisfree,” in which he declared his fidelity to “the deep heart’s core.” Throughout his fifty-year literary

career, he has delved so deep into the heart’s core that he has discovered, not the lapping waters of

Innisfree, but the foul rag and bone shop in which he now lies down. As Yeats wrote in an earlier poem,

“The Coming of Wisdom with Time,”

Though leaves are many, the root is one;

Through all the lying days of my youth

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;

Now I may wither into the truth.

Study Questions

1. One of the important themes in Yeats’s writing is his exploration of the relationship between the natural

and the artificial, and particularly the relationship between nature and art. With particular reference to

the two Byzantium poems, describe how Yeats characterizes this relationship. Does he prefer the natural

to art, or art to nature?

Answer:

Because the artificial is permanent, unfading, impervious to decay, beautiful, and free of the troubles of

the human heart, and because the natural is impermanent, fading, destined to decay, frequently ugly,

and troubled by pain and longing, Yeats consistently finds himself attracted to the artificial, particularly

when it is at its most beautiful. In the Byzantium poems, Yeats glorifies a golden bird that is the

apotheosis of the relationship between nature and art: the bird takes its form from nature, but it is not

bound to “the fury and the mire of human veins.” It will last forever, and will never forget how to sing;

and Yeats longs to become it.

2. Some of Yeats’s least accessible poems are his works of visionary history, which often incorporatethemes from A Vision and seem, on the surface, thematically irrelevant to contemporary readers. How

can these poems best be understood—in other words, should they be read today strictly for their

magnificent language, or is there a way in which they embrace more universal elements of human

experience than their occult, mythological frame of reference might imply? (Think especially about “Leda

and the Swan” and “The Second Coming.”)

Answer:

The language of “Leda” and “The Second Coming” is certainly magnificent, but the poems’ themes are

also quite powerful, and remain relevant to the experience of contemporary readers. Putting aside all

the mystical jargon from A Vision, “The Second Coming” is a brilliant evocation of chaos and primal

energy, and of a kind of eerie premonition: the sphinx “slouching toward Bethlehem” can be interpretedin many ways besides that which Yeats described. And “Leda” is a wonderful document of a violent

encounter with the incomprehensible, the alien, the overwhelming, and of a turning point after which

nothing will ever be the same.

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3. If you have read John Keats’s great “Ode to a Nightingale,” compare it to Yeats’s equally great “Sailing

to Byzantium.” In what ways does the Yeats poem seem designed to refute the Keats poem? How does

the singing golden bird differ from Keats’s singing nightingale?

Answer:

Our first clue that the Yeats poem may be related to the earlier Keats poem occurs in the first stanza,when the speaker calls the birds singing in the trees “dying generations,” a phrase quite similar to one in

Keats’s ode— “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down.”

From that moment on, the poems are as thematically opposite as is possible for two poems glorifying

art. Keats’s nightingale (a natural bird) is a symbol of lyric fluidity, expressiveness, change, and union

with nature; around the nightingale, Keats thinks that it would be “sweet to die” and “to cease upon the

midnight with no pain.” Yeats’s golden bird (an artificial bird) is a symbol of permanence, knowledge,

unchangeability, and a liberating separation from nature; Yeats longs to be “gathered into the artifice of

eternity” precisely because he does not wish to age and to die.

4. “Adam’s Curse” is one of Yeats’s finest early poems, and one of his simplest and most moving love

poems. How does the style of the poem mirror its explicit statement about beauty? How does it connectthe labor of living with weariness in life and in love?

5. Compare and contrast “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” a very early poem by Yeats, with “The Circus

Animals’ Desertion,” written not long before he died. What, if anything, do these poems have in

common? How are they different? What does each poem say about the human heart, and how does the

difference between those statements indicate Yeats’s development as a poet?

6. “The Irish Airman foresees his Death” is a good example of the way in which Yeats combines the

political with the personal and the mystical. How does the airman’s involvement in World War I relate to

his “lonely impulse of delight,” and what does the “lonely impulse of delight” say about his

understanding of the war? What does the poem itself seem to say about the war?

7. Yeats’s style is quite unique among both nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets. What

characterizes his poetic style? What kind of consciousness seems to be indicated by his rough meters,

half-rhymes, and frequent violations of formal constraints? How do these traits affect, enhance, or

interfere with his aesthetic articulation of his themes?



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