William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats
Note: The possessive Yeats's is now more accepted than Yeats'.
Seamus Heaney, reviewing a biography of Yeats by Roy Foster (A Life -The Apprentice
Mage), provides a useful overview of Yeats's range and energy in this short extract:
Indeed, one of the many virtues of Foster's magisterial book is the way it
keeps overwhelming the reader with a sense of Yeats's tirelessness as a
mover and shaker at every level of his affairs -- familial, cultural, sexual,
political, artistic, amorous. A born publicist who was also a silenceseeking lyric poet, a self-made controversialist whose public stances
often caused him much private pain, a heroic lover whose beloved
desired him to abjure desire, a faithful friend with a habit of falling out
with the ones who meant most to him, a cultural administrator and
committeeman who did not believe in democracy in the arts, he always
had his work cut out for him.1
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Theme: The theme of this poem is the desire to escape from the greyness of London and
to return to the beauty of Innisfree.
In a recent survey by The Irish Times, this was voted 'Ireland's Favourite Poem'. 2 It is
certainly one of Yeats's best-known poems; it is possibly also one of his most irritating.
1 The Atlantic Monthly; November 1997; All Ireland's Bard; Volume 280, No. 5; pages 155-160.
2 See last page for the top ten.
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St Andrew's College 2010
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Although it's not exactly what Polonius had in mind when he uses the phrase 'comicalpastoral', this term may justifiably be applied to the poem for there is something
inherently comical and fake in his attempt to strike the pose of the hermit (or, to use
Heaney's phrase, the 'silence-seeking lyric poet') who seeks happiness in pastoral
isolation. His solemnity misfires; instead he comes across as a faintly lunatic figure intent
on surviving solely on a diet of beans and honey. Fortunately, given his diet, he intends to
live alone.
The first verse manages only to create in the reader's mind the ludicrous image of Yeats,
floppy bow-tie in disarray, pince-nez askew, struggling vainly to master the skills
required for the construction of a small cabin 'of clay and wattles'.
The details of the simple life as envisioned by Yeats are so idealized that it hardly seems
credible that Innisfree is an actual place. In reality, according to those who have been
lured there by this poem, it is a small and unimpressive island in Lough Gill in Sligo.
Indeed, it is apparently so unimpressive that, in his later years, Yeats searched the lake
unsuccessfully for the island. Many tourists have been disappointed to discover that the
locals refer to it as 'Rat Island'. The Innisfree where Yeats wishes to spend his life eating
beans while listening to the birds and the bees, however, is an island of the mind, an
embellished version of the real thing. It is the earliest in a series of actual places that,
once within the ambit of Yeats's poetic imagination, are forever endowed with symbolic
power. These places of the earth and mind include Thoor Ballylee, Byzantium,
Connemara, Dublin, and Ireland itself. The appeal of Innisfree is primarily the result of
its being an idealized version of rustic life: the tranquil solitude is interrupted only by the
buzzing of the bees, the 'singing' of the crickets and the lapping of the lake water by the
shore.
Words such as 'cabin', 'clay and wattle', ' hive' and 'live alone' all contribute to the sense
of simplicity. However, the poem suffers from its syrupy wholesomeness, the cloying
honey of the pastoral clichés, to the point where the reader would almost welcome the
arrival of a noisy jet-ski propelled at full speed around Lough Gill by a tattooed yob.
September 1913
Theme: The theme of this poem is Yeats's contempt for the philistine Dublin merchant
class. It is a direct response to political and cultural events of the time.
The original title was Romance in Ireland/ (On Reading much of the correspondence
against the art gallery).
This poem achieves its effect by contrasting the glorious past with the inglorious present.
Two important events took place in September 1913. First, Dublin Corporation rejected
Yeats's ambitious plan for an art gallery to house a collection of thirty-nine paintings
donated to the Irish people by the millionaire Hugh Lane. One of the conditions of the
gift was that the city would fund the building of a suitable gallery - Lane favoured the site
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St Andrew's College 2010
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of the Ha'penny Bridge - but the Corporation, influenced by William Martin Murphy, a
wealthy Dublin businessman, considered the project too expensive and unnecessary.
Second, the employers of Dublin commenced their 'lock-out'. Jim Larkin, a Liverpool
trades' union leader, wanted to improve working conditions for the ordinary workers of
Dublin and had encouraged them to join a trade union. He was opposed, again, by
William Martin Murphy. Afraid of the potential power of unionised labour, Murphy
persuaded some 400 employers to lock out 20,000 workers in an effort to starve them into
submission. The 'lock-out' lasted until January 1914.
These two events combined to make Yeats bitter and the poem is his retaliation.
Although Yeats's target is the Dublin business classes, and especially the phenomenally
wealthy William Martin Murphy, he manages to convey his contempt for them by
reducing them to the status of small shopkeepers of the kind who 'fumble in a greasy till'
and who add 'halfpence to the pence'.
The first verse addresses a rhetorical question to the middle-classes: what more do you
need in life, now that you have have money and religion? The question is laden with
contempt for what Yeats sees as the hypocrisy of the middle-classes - money and religion
should not really go hand in hand. In the refrain, he laments the passing of the heroes of
old, people such as John O'Leary, a friend of Yeats's father. O'Leary combined the
qualities that appealed to Yeats: he was cultured, intellectual, patriotic and selfless. As
such, he was, in Yeats's mind, the antithesis of William Martin Murphy.
The second stanza rebukes the people of Dublin for forgetting 'the names that stilled your
childish play': the names of the dead heroes. They had little time to pray or save money
because they were too concerned with saving Ireland.
In the third stanza, Yeats asks if the Dublin of 1913 is what the 'Wild Geese' sacrificed
their lives for. (These were the Irish nobility and soldiers who fled Ireland in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and who subsequently fought in Catholic armies in
France and Spain.) He names three patriots, all Protestant, each of whom gave up a life of
relative privilege and comfort to fight against English rule in Ireland (Lord Edward
Fitzgerald renounced his title and his parliamentary seat). He refers to their deeds as 'the
delirium of the brave'. This phrase deftly captures the ambiguity of Yeats's feelings: on
the one hand, he admires their bravery; but, on the other, he acknowledges that their
actions and dreams are mad and irrational in a way that those of hard-headed
businessmen cannot be.
In the final verse, Yeats imagines the response of the Dublin merchant classes to the
plight of the old heroes exiled 'in all their loneliness and pain'. Instead of admiring their
selflessness, people like Martin Murphy would sneeringly dismiss their bravery as having
been prompted by a base instinct, such as lust for 'some woman's yellow hair'.
The slight change in the refrain, 'Let them be…', provides a note of regretful finality to
the poem as if Yeats realises there is nothing that can be done to change the Dublin of
1913.
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Easter 1916
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother's womb
A fanatic heart.
From Remorse for Intemperate Speech
Theme: Yeats re-evaluates the participants in the 1916 Rising. He also expresses his
dislike of fanaticism and hints at his fears for the future of Ireland.
Verse one describes how Yeats had always maintained a certain distance between himself
and these fanatics, with their 'vivid faces' and ridiculous ideals. He even admits to a
certain hypocrisy: while occasionally speaking to one or other of them, he would be
mentally preparing an amusing story about them for his friends in the club. He was
convinced that they were not serious about an armed insurrection; now he knows he was
wrong: all is changed utterly.
In the second verse, he recalls some of those involved: Constance Gore-Booth (later
Countess Markiewicz), Patrick Pearse, Thomas McDonagh and Major John McBride (exhusband of Maud Gonne). For the cause of Irish freedom, some have sacrificed their
beauty, some their talent: all were prepared to sacrifice their lives and have thereby
become heroes. They have been 'transformed utterly'.
The third section is philosophical in tone. Yeats contrasts the rigidity of the 'fanatic heart'
with the constantly changing world of nature. He seems to be arguing as follows:
everything in nature changes - water, animals, man, birds, clouds. Change is part of the
natural order. Fanaticism and obsession, on the other hand, are unnatural; they turn the
heart to a stone that simply sits immobile in the river of life.
This idea is reiterated in the final section. Fanaticism and hate enslave and dehumanise
people. However, only Heaven can say when one has sacrificed enough; his, and our,
duty now is to simply repeat the names of the heroes in the same way that a mother
repeats the name of a beloved child. He speculates that perhaps their deaths were
needless - Britain may well decide to grant Home Rule, as she had promised before the
outbreak of World War I. In any case, Yeats acknowledges that their motives were noble
and that they acted out of 'an excess of love'. From now on, he realises, wherever green is
worn, these people will be regarded as heroes.
The oxymoronic refrain, 'a terrible beauty is born', neatly encapsulates Yeats's ambivalent
feelings about the Rising. On the one hand, as an advocate of 'cultural nationalism' he
saw it as a natural continuation on a political level of the work that he himself has started
in the intellectual and literary life of the country. On the other hand, though, he realised
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that the Rising would provoke a profound and abrupt upheaval in the social and political
fabric of the country. If one considers the subsequent War of Independence, the partition
of the Six Counties and the almost unceasing violence in that part of the country since
1969 as part of the legacy of the Rising, then it's not difficult to agree with Yeats that it
was a 'terrible beauty'.
The Second Coming
Theme: The theme of this poem is the poet's belief that an apocalyptic event would take
place at the end of the second millennium.
This is a difficult poem to understand. It owes much to Yeats's beliefs in mysticism and a
complex system of historical progress and change that he described in A Vision. Shortly
after his marriage to George Hyde-Lees in 1917, she claimed she received messages from
supernatural voices. Yeats, through the medium of his wife, asked the voices if they
wanted him to devote himself to them. 'No', they replied, 'we have come to bring you
metaphors for poetry'.
The following is by Dr Karen Droisen, University of Nevada:
http://www.unlv.edu/faculty/droisen/437byeats.htm
In this poem, we see Yeats' interest in synthesizing several different
world views into one global theory of human history. Towards this end,
Yeats studied Hinduism, Celtic history, Christianity, Buddhism, and the
occult. Like many of his contemporaries -- Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and
James Joyce, for example -- Yeats sought to discover and create a unified
theory of world history. We can understand this goal if we consider the
historical context: in the wake of World War I, most Europeans and
Americans found their world views badly shaken. Yeats sought to put the
pieces of European culture back together by discovering their origins in
world literature and religions.
Yeats came to believe in a cyclical theory of history as he studied
comparative history and religion. Indeed, circles are a repeated motif in
"The Second Coming" and in his other publications. The title of "The
Second Coming" suggests that the poem will depict the Apocalypse,
described in Revelation. But biblical history is linear, not cyclical: it has
a beginning (Genesis), a turning point (the birth and crucifixion of
Christ), and an ending prophesied by the Revelation of St John the
Divine. Thus, although the title and much of the poem's language and
imagery echo biblical descriptions, its connection to the vision of St John
remains obscure. The speaker of the poem seems, at best, doubtful of
what he sees: he is a visionary who is unable to understand his vision.
The reader shares this confusion in part because the poem begins in
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medias res(in the middle of the story): we are plunged into the speaker's
vision without any preparation. We do not learn, for example, that the
poem describes a vision until line 18, when we learn that the vision itself
has vanished. As you read the poem, consider first the images the
speaker describes. What do they have in common? How can we interpret
them? What do they seem to foretell? Then consider the speaker's
commentary on his vision: what explanation -- if any -- do the final four
lines offer?
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
For some help making sense of this dense and difficult poem, try
Josef Sila's essay on Yeats - http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8156/yeats.html

For discusssion on this: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/289.html

For more detail than most people will ever need, go to:
http://www.yeatsvision.com/Yeats.html

The poem concerns what Yeats believed would happen in the year 2000. Just as Christ's
birth inaugurated the Christian era, a new era would begin with the birth of Christ's
antithesis, or opposite, some time around the year 2000. Hence, the reference to 'the
rough beast' slouching his way towards Bethlehem.
The poem, written in 1919, is set in an imaginary future, just before the end of the
Christian era. It opens with images of chaos, disorder and catastrophe, as befits a poem
that is, in part, a response to the horror of World War I. The 'falcon cannot hear the
falconer; things fall apart' and pure anarchy is 'loosed upon the world'. This apocalyptic
vision of the world concludes with a criticism of people's moral cowardice: the good have
become apathetic and indifferent; the evil have enormous levels of energy.
Such disorder can only mean one thing: some revelation is at hand - perhaps it is the
Second Coming. Normally, the Second Coming refers to the belief that on the Last Day
God will appear on Earth to judge everyone; it is believed that certain events will precede
God's appearance: '[…] the action of fire will begin before the judgement. It will, St
Thomas thinks, kill and destroy the bodies of all upon earth, torturing the evil, serving as
purgatorial torment to the imperfect, and inflicting God's vengeance on the wicked'.3
The very words 'Second Coming' seem to create a hallucination or vision from the
spiritus mundi ('the soul, or mind, of the world' - a sort of bank of images given to man
3
A Catholic Dictionary, ed. by William E. Addis and Thomas Arnolds. (London: Virtue, 1953), under
Judgment.
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by supernatural agents). It is a vision of a half-human, half-animal creature that stirs itself
in the desert and begins to walk, sending birds reeling in terror. The vision fades
(darkness drops again) but now Yeats knows one thing for certain: the rocking of the
cradle that contained this beast signals the end of Christianity. The poem ends with the
terrifying, nighmarish image of the beast slouching 'towards Bethlehem to be born'.
The poem's tone and imagery could be described as 'apocalyptic'. The OED tells us that
apocalypse means 'grand or violent event resembling those described in St John's book'
[of Revelation]. Indeed, this book is sometimes known as The Apocalypse, and it
describes John's vision of the end of the world in nightmarish detail. A section of
Matthew's Gospel also deals with the Second Coming in similarly violent imagery. In
Matthew 24, Jesus speaks of the Final Judgment:
¶ And as he sat upon the mount Olivet, his disciples came unto him
secretly saying: Tell us, when this shall be? and what sign shall be of thy
coming, and of the end of the world? and Jesus answered, and said unto
them: take heed that no man deceive you, for many shall come in my
name saying: I am Christ: and shall deceive many.
¶ Ye shall hear of wars, and of the noise of wars, but see that ye be
not troubled, for all these things must come to pass, but the end is
not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and realm against
realm: and there shall be pestilence, and hunger, and earthquakes in
all quarters. All these are the beginning of sorrows.
If they shall say unto you: lo, he is in the desert, go not forth: lo, he is in
the secret places, believe not. For as the lightning cometh out of the east,
and shineth unto the west: so shall the coming of the son of man be. For
wheresoever a dead body is, even thither will the eagles resort.
¶ Immediately after the tribulations of those days, shall the sun be
darkeneth: and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall
fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall move. And then
shall appear the sign of the son of man in heaven. And then shall all
the kindreds of the earth mourn, and they shall see the son of man
come in the clouds of heaven with power and great majesty: And he
shall send his angels with the great voice of a trumpet, and they shall
gather together his chosen from the four winds, and from the one
end of the world to the other.
But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no not the angels of
heaven, but my father only.
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Sailing to Byzantium
Theme: The theme of this poem is the poet's desire to compensate for his physical ageing
by concentrating on the life of the mind and by becoming a work of art.
An early draft of the poem contained the lines:
For many loves I have taken off my clothes
For some I threw them off in haste,
For some slowly and indifferently…
But now I will take off my body.
The first stanza sees Yeats leaving Ireland in disgust. It is not a suitable place for old
men. The young seem to have taken over; images of vitality, sexuality and energy
abound. Everyone is obsessed with trivial, mortal things: 'whatever is begotten, born and
dies'. As a consequence, they neglect the things of the mind, the 'monuments of unageing
intellect'.
Stanza II begins by focusing on the misery of being an 'aged man'. His view of old age is
bleak: an aged man is a 'paltry thing', no better than a scarecrow unless - and 'unless' is
the crucial word - he learns to sing in order to compensate for the tatters in his 'mortal
dress', ie: his body. How does one learn to sing? There is no school that one can attend;
one learns simply by studying monuments of the soul's magnificence - works of art.
Therefore, the poet tells us, he has come to Byzantium.Why Byzantium rather than, say,
Bundoran or Brittas? Because Byzantium was a place where the artist was held in high
esteem. People respected the work of the artist and understood that the appreciation of art
had a valuable role to play in society.
In the third stanza, Yeats is standing in a church in Byzantium, contemplating a mosaic
(similar to these: http://www.hp.uab.edu/image_archive/ulj/uljc.html Sept 2004). It depicts sages,
or wise men, standing in a fire. He asks them to come down from the mosaic, by spinning
through time ('perne in a gyre'), and become his singing masters. He asks them to remove
his soul from his mortal body and take it back with them into the 'artifice of eternity' (the
work of art, in this case, the mosaic).
In the final stanza, Yeats assures us that once he reaches eternity he will never take on the
shape or appearance 'of any mortal thing'. Instead, he would like to assume the shape of a
work of art, such as might have been created by Grecian goldsmiths. He thinks of a
golden bird that perhaps he read of, or saw somewhere, and thinks how he would like to
become such a work of art. Its qualities of beauty and permanence are in direct contrast to
the tattered frailty of the 'aged man'.
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In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewicz
Theme: The theme of this poem is the destructive effects of fanaticism and time.
The manuscript version of this poem is dated 21 September 1927. Constance Markiewicz
(née Gore-Booth) died in August 1927. Her sister, Eva, had died the previous year.
The first verse is a wistful and nostalgic reminiscence of lost beauty, lost friendship and
lost dreams. The opening lines of the poem manage to be both highly musical and
cinematic in their effect. The combination of the long vowels and the repetition of the l's
creates an atmosphere of languid elegance and tranquillity. The image of the two girls in
silk kimonos, powerful enough in itself, is given further force by the likening of one of
them (Eva) to a gazelle.
The stillness of the scene is brutally interrupted by the violence of autumn's shears
destroying summer's blossom. The mood changes brusquely from wistful nostalgia to
bitter recrimination. The older of the two, Constance, is condemned to death (for her part
in the 1916 Rising), but later pardoned. Yeats feels that she lived out her remaining years
'conspiring among the ignorant'. In fact, Yeats is conveniently ignoring the fact that she
was the first woman to be elected as MP to the House of Commons - for Sinn Féin - and
took an active part in politics. He is similarly dismissive of Eva who, in addition to
publishing over four hundred poems, also dedicated herself to fighting for women's
voting rights and trade unions in England. Her efforts on behalf of the early feminist
movement are waved away with the contemptuous phrase, 'some vague Utopia'. Both
sisters, Yeats feels, sacrificed their lives, and their beauty, to causes which were
worthless. He acknowledges that 'many a time' he meant to 'seek one or the other out' and
chat about the old days but there is a clear implication that he just never managed to get
around to it. The verse ends on an elegiac note with the repetition of the images of the
kimonos and the gazelle.
The second stanza is a direct address to Eva and Constance who, now that they are dead,
have become 'shadows'. He speaks to them across the divide that separates the living
from the dead and seems to be saying, condescendingly, 'I told you so - now you know
how worthless all your idealistic campaigns were.' As far as Yeats is concerned, the great
enemy is neither the British nor the male supremacists, but time itself. This alone can
destroy innocence and beauty. In an image that recalls the burning and looting of Dublin
in 1916, and therefore casts him in the role of a different and - to his mind, at least superior, kind of revolutionary, he volunteers to 'strike a match' and set fire to time itself.
His notion that time is something that we have constructed ourselves is a difficult one to
grasp and one that does not seem to sit easily with his obsession with ageing. However, it
is possibly easy to understand that if one could convince oneself that time could be
destroyed, then there would be no need to worry about its effects.
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In Foster's biography mentioned above, he glosses the final lines as follows:
The Georgian image of a 'great gazebo' suggests the fragile structure of
Ascendancy achievement…'we' embraces Yeats and his chosen
Ascendancy ancestors; and the people who convicted 'us' of guilt are not
the 'sages' but the Gore-Booths themselves, who denounced the AngloIrish world from whence they came.
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Ireland's Top Ten Favourite Poems
(based on a 2001 survey)
1.
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by W. B. Yeats
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee
2.
"He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" by W. B. Yeats
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams
3.
"Mid-Term Break" by Seamus Heaney
A four foot box, a foot for every year
4.
"The Song of Wandering Aengus" by W. B. Yeats
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
5.
"On Raglan Road" by Patrick Kavanagh
I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret signs
6.
"Easter, 1916" by W. B. Yeats
A terrible beauty is born.
7.
"When You are Old" by W.B. Yeats
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you
8.
"Canal Bank Walk" by Patrick Kavanagh
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat
9.
"Stony Grey Soil" by Patrick Kavanagh
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
10. "The Stolen Child" by W. B. Yeats
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