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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 silence-

seeking 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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Although it's not exactly what Polonius had in mind when he uses the phrase 'comical-

pastoral', 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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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 (ex-

husband 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?

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 Anglo-

Irish 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