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Yeats's PoetryWilliam Butler Yeats

Context

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865 to a chaotic, artistic family. Hisfather, a portrait painter, moved the family to London when Yeats was two, andWilliam spent much of his childhood moving between the cold urban landscapeof the metropolis and the congenial countryside of County Sligo, Ireland, wherehis mother's parents lived. An aesthete even as a boy, Yeats began writingverse early, and published his first work in 1885. In 1889, Yeats met the Irishpatriot, revolutionary, and beauty Maud Gonne. He fell immediately in love withher, and remained so for the rest of his life; virtually every reference to abeloved in Yeats's poetry can be understood as a reference to Maud Gonne.Tragically, Gonne did not return his love, and though they remained closelyassociated (she portrayed the lead role in several of his plays), they were neverromantically involved. Many years later, Yeats proposed to her daughter--andwas rejected again.

Yeats lived during a tumultuous time in Ireland, during the political rise and fallof Charles Stuart Parnell, the Irish Revival, and the civil war. Partly because ofhis love for the politically active Maud Gonne, Yeats devoted himself during theearly part of his career to the Literary Revival and to Irish patriotism, seekingto develop a new religious iconography based on Irish mythology. (Though hewas of Protestant parentage, Yeats played little part in the conflict betweenCatholics and Protestants that tore Ireland apart during his lifetime.) He quicklyrose to literary prominence, and helped to found what became the AbbeyTheatre, one of the most important cultural institutions in Ireland, at which heworked with such luminaries as Augusta Gregory and the playwright JohnSynge. 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 onlyreached 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, writingmagnificent poems up until two weeks before his death. The normal expectationis that a poet's powers will fade after forty or fifty; Yeats defied thatexpectation and trumped it entirely, writing most of his greatest poems--fromthe crushing power of The Tower to the eerie mysticism of the Last Poems--inthe years after he won the Nobel Prize, a testament to the force andcommitment with which he devoted himself to transforming his inner life intopoetry. Because his work straddles the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,Yeats is stylistically quite a unique poet; his early work seems curiously modern

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for the nineteenth century, and his late work often seems curiously un-modernfor the 1930s. But Yeats wrote great poems in every decade of his life, and hisinfluence has towered over the past six decades; today, he is generallyregarded as the greatest poet of the twentieth century.

AnalysisYeats is the greatest poet in the history of Ireland and probably the greatestpoet to write in English during the twentieth century; his themes, images,symbols, metaphors, and poetic sensibilities encompass the breadth of hispersonal experience, as well as his nation's experience during one of its mosttroubled times. Yeats's great poetic project was to reify his own life--histhoughts, feelings, speculations, conclusions, dreams--into poetry: to render allof himself into art, but not in a merely confessional or autobiographicalmanner; he was not interested in the common-place. (The poet, Yeats famouslyremarked, is not the man who sits down to breakfast in the morning.) Hiselaborate iconography takes elements from Irish mythology, Greek mythology,nineteenth-century occultism (which Yeats dabbled in with Madame Blavatskyand the Society of the Golden Dawn), English literature, Byzantine art,European politics, and Christian imagery, all wound together and informed withhis own experience and interpretive understanding.

His thematic focus could be sweepingly grand: in the 1920s and '30s he evenconcocted a mystical theory of the universe, which explained history,imagination, and mythology in light of an occult set of symbols, and which helaid out in his book A Vision (usually considered important today only for thelight it sheds on some of his poems). However, in his greatest poems, hemitigates this grandiosity with a focus on his own deep feeling. Yeats's ownexperience is never far from his poems, even when they seem obscurelyimagistic or theoretically abstract, and the veil of obscurity and abstraction isoften lifted once one gains an understanding of how the poet's livedexperiences relate to the poem in question.

No poet of the twentieth century more persuasively imposed his personalexperience onto history by way of his art; and no poet more successfullyplumbed the truths contained within his "deep heart's core," even when theythreatened to render his poetry clichéd or ridiculous. His integrity andpassionate commitment to work according to his own vision protect his poemsfrom all such accusations. To contemporary readers, Yeats can seem baffling;he was opposed to the age of science, progress, democracy, andmodernization, and his occultist and mythological answers to those problemscan seem horribly anachronistic for a poet who died barely sixty years ago. ButYeats's goal is always to arrive at personal truth; and in that sense, despite hisprofound individuality, he remains one of the most universal writers ever tohave lived.

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"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 cannothold"; anarchy is loosed upon the world; "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, andeverywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned." The best people, thespeaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst "are full of passionate intensity."Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; "Surely the SecondComing is at hand." No sooner does he think of "the Second Coming," then heis troubled by "a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit ofmankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx ("A shape with lion body andthe head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun") is moving, whilethe shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over thespeaker's sight, but he knows that the sphinx's twenty centuries of "stonysleep" have been made a nightmare by the motions of "a rocking cradle." Andwhat "rough beast," he wonders, "its hour come round at last, / Slouchestowards Bethlehem to be born?"

Form"The Second Coming" is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but themeter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closerto free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard;apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are onlycoincidental rhymes in the poem, such as "man" and "sun."

CommentaryBecause of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language,"The Second Coming" is one of Yeats's most famous and most anthologizedpoems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult tounderstand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem couldparaphrase its meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the poem is quite simple--the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things fallingapart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that amonstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we firstknew, but of a new messiah, a "rough beast," the slouching sphinx rousingitself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem. This brief exposition,though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly complicated; but the questionof what it should signify to a reader is another story entirely.

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Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that hedescribed in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats's lifelongfascination with the occult and mystical, and in part from the sense ofresponsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured beliefsystem. The system is extremely complicated and not of any lastingimportance--except for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is ofextraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in AVision 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 ofthe other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called thespirals "gyres") captured the contrary motions inherent within the historicalprocess, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that representedparticular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychologicalphases of an individual's development).

"The Second Coming" was intended by Yeats to describe the current historicalmoment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believedthat the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as historyreached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving alongthe inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats's poems, Richard J. Finneranquotes Yeats's own notes:The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of thenext age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatestexpansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation[that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of theinterior 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-pathof the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take itscharacter not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from thecontrary inner gyre--which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, andslowness 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 visionof 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 factthat it has not come true as yet). But as poetry, and understood more broadlythan as a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of A Vision, "The SecondComing" is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work inhistory, and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancientworld. 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; butthe aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough toensure its value and its importance in Yeats's work as a whole.

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"Byzantium"

Summary

At night in the city of Byzantium, "The unpurged images of day recede." Thedrunken soldiers of the Emperor are asleep, and the song of night-walkersfades after the great cathedral gong. The "starlit" or "moonlit dome," thespeaker says, disdains all that is human--"All mere complexities, / The fury andthe mire of human veins." The speaker says that before him floats an image--aman or a shade, but more a shade than a man, and still more simply "animage." The speaker hails this "superhuman" image, calling it "death-in-life andlife-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 allcomplexities of mire or blood."

At midnight, the speaker says, the images of flames flit across the Emperor'spavement, 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 oftrance, / An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve," leaving behind all thecomplexities and furies of life. Riding the backs of dolphins, spirit after spiritarrives, the flood broken on "the golden smithies of the Emperor." The marblesof the dancing floor break the "bitter furies of complexity," the storms ofimages that beget more images, "That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea."

FormThe pronounced differences in "Byzantium"'s line lengths make its stanzasappear very haphazard; however, they are actually quite regular: each stanzaconstitutes eight lines, and each rhymes AABBCDDC. Metrically, each is quitecomplicated; the lines are loosely iambic, with the first, second, third, fifth, andeighth lines in pentameter, the fourth line in tetrameter, and the sixth andseventh line in trimeter, so that the pattern of line-stresses in each stanza is55545335.

CommentaryWe have read Yeats's account of "Sailing to Byzantium"; now he has arrived atthe city itself, and is able to describe it. In "Sailing to Byzantium" the speakerstated 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 backsof dolphins, to be forged into "the artifice of eternity"--ghostlike images with nophysical presence ("a flame that cannot singe a sleeve"). The narrative andimagistic arrangement of this poem is highly ambiguous and complicated; it isunclear whether Yeats intends the poem to be a register of symbols or anactual mythological statement. (In classical mythology, dolphins often carry thedead to their final resting-place.)

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In any event, we see here the same preference for the artificial above theactual that appeared in "Sailing to Byzantium"; only now the speaker hasencountered actual creatures that exist "in the artifice of eternity"--mostnotably the golden bird of stanza three. But the preference is now tinged withambiguity: the bird looks down upon "common bird or petal," but it does so notout of existential necessity, but rather because it has been coerced into doingso, as it were--"by the moon embittered." The speaker's demonstratedpreoccupation with "fresh images" has led some critics to conclude that thepoem is really an allegory of the process by which fantasies are rendered intoart, images arriving from the "dolphin-torn, the gong-tormented sea," thenbeing made into permanent artifacts by "the golden smithies of the Emperor."It is impossible to say whether this is all or part of Yeats's intention, and it isdifficult to see how the prevalent symbols of the afterlife connect thematicallyto the topic of images (how could images be dead?). For all its difficulty andalmost unfixed quality of meaning--the poem is difficult to place even within thecontext of A Vision--the intriguing imagery and sensual language of the poemare tokens of its power; simply as the evocation of a fascinating imaginaryscene, "Byzantium" is unmatched in all of Yeats.