Short Notes of W.B.. Yeats Poetry

Q :           What are Yeats’ personal views about Easter rising as stated in ‘Easter 1916’?

Ans :  Written five months after the tragic event of 1916, the poem commemorates the 1916 uprising.  The poem holds a place of honour among the  political poems composed during the turbulent  days of Irish Rebellion and British respression.  It is a tribute to the heroic martyrdom of the Irish nationalists.  These Irish nationalists arose bravely and heroically and rebelled against the English oppression.  They even announced publicly an establishment of the Irish republic.  These leaders were captured very soon and sixteen out of them were executed.

These ordinary Irish men, who suddenly adopted a life of revolt and leadership, surprised Yeats and he was greatly touched by their martyrdom.  Himself, he did not  really agree with their politics, yet as a poet, he could not overlook the whole tragic situation, which was  transformed by the daring act of the rebels.  In a letter written to Lady Gregory, shortly after the execution of the patriots, Yeats wrote :

                “I am trying to write a poem on the men executed :

                a terrible beauty has been born again.”

The poem thus is an effort to celebrate the rebellion, though it expresses a mixed, mood of the poet.   It begins with a sense of surprise and moves on to a note of doubt regarding the significance of the daring deed and finally ends with an admiration for the noble heroism of the common people, transformed by their awakening.  Yeats has been recognized as poet of mixed feelings and this significant feature surfaces in the poem.

Q : Explain the complex idea conveyed in the phrase. “A terrible beauty is born”

Ans         The “terrible” here does not remain to be simply terrible.  It qualifies “beauty” thus expressing Yeats’s complex feelings about the rebellion.  The martyrdom of the motley is underlined as tragic transformation of the ordinary to the  heroic.  Raising the question of the worth of this deed.  Yeats himself tries to answer them.

Q : Comment on the personal note in Easter 1916?

Ans         Easter 1916 is not without Yeats’s own involvement in the violent adventure.  He personally feels that his own poems had a role  to play in the  provocation among these ordinary men to give up their easy and comic life and to rise in a rebellion.  Hence, the poem has a personal touch which expresses the characteristic complexity of Yeats’s poetry.

The colloquial line of the opening stanza presents a note of surprise  as felt by the poet.  The personal note is apparent in the poet’s  expression :

                I have met them at close of Day

                Coming with vivid faces

                From counter or desk among grey

                Eighteenth century houses

These are familiar men, whom the poet has often met casually at the end of the day.  He has exchanged with them words of formal courtesy and “Polite meaningless words.”   Like himself  these  ordinary men were a part of the motley multitutde that was a part of the entire irish life.  There did not seem anything  heroic  about them and yet all of a sudden  they had performed a deed of tragic heroism and completely transformed  themselves  into figures  of breath-taking nobility.

“All changes, changes utterly.”

The poet expresses a surprise at this sudden transformation and the first stanza ends as a perfect example of the marked complexity in  Yeats’s poetry.

Q : Comment on the symbol of “stone” as used by Yeats in 1916.

Ans :  The symbol of stone takes a different  meaning.  Not standing only for inflexibility or immortality, it evokes a sense of sacrifice.  Having spoken  of the sole and steadfast concentration of one single purpose of the courageous hearts, the poet refers to the “Sacrifice”, “making  a stone of the Heart.”  Very quickly, Yeats shifts from the idea of heart  having turned  into “stone” and leaves it to God to  judge and evaluate the human motive and action.

Q : Comment on the portrait of Maud Gonne as Drawn out in “No Second Troy.”

Ans :  Disillusioned by her marriage to MacBride, Yeats could only celebrate her beauty in poems like “No second Troy”.  Often in such poems, he magnificiently draws out with dignity the portrait of Maud Gonne.  With mixed   feelings, he elaborates upon Maud’s  revolutionary zeal, which personally Yeats did not really appreciate.  Yet, the misery she had caused him did not really diminish  his admirationof her personality and he never stopped to make reference to her in his poetry.

In “ No Second Troy”  Yeats begins by justifying the revolutionary spirit of Maud Gonne.  The point to be noted is that even while the poet disapproves  of the revolutionary zeal in Maud, he does not really show  contempt for her.  Rather he is angry with people  who follow her  and consider her revolutionary views as right.  Maud is made to be an extraordinary figure by comparing her to Helen.  Maud has been dealt with on three levels, national, mythological and personal.  This is  what makes the poem rather complex  and interesting.  Maud also get and archetypal  treatment in the poem.  She is a reality and Helen is a dream.  Maud is identified with Helen on two levels – beauty and destruction.  These  similarities are drawn till the end.

Yeats actually wants to say that Maud is born  in a wrong age – an age that does not have the values  of  the ancient times.  Her nobility, simplicity and beauty stand much above those who belong to this  age.  In spite of the fact that she is born in the modern age, her beauty stands for the values of the past.

The poet hints at the destructiveness caused by Maud.  Here Maud is directly linked with Helen  of Troy.  She is one of those historical women whose beauty has been the root of destruction.

There is not Troy in the modern world.  Therefore, Maud’s vigour and fervour find no outles.  In the Modern world, the only outlet to her vigour and over  energetic sould is the revolutionary fervour.

Q  Explain the final lines of the poem “No Second troy” : “Why, what could she have done, being what she is, Was there another Troy for her to burn”.

Ans         The final question, however expresses the final justification of  Maud  :

                                Why what could she have done being what she is

                                Was there another Troy for her to burn.

                Yeats’s view is thus underlined that there is not “Troy” to burn.  In modern times the heroic element of Helen’s times is missing.  The souls of the modern times are beyond the penetration of Maud, as compared to the heroic souls of the world of Helen of Troy.

Q : Is the title of the poem “The Second Coming” a misnomer”.  Discuss it in the context of the poetic vision contained in the poem.

Ans :   The title has been termed as inappropriate by critics like Donald David and Harold Bloom.  For example.  Donald remarks : “The title of the poem is a misnomer”. Harold Bloom is more forthright in his objection and holds  that “the title of the poem is not only a misnomer but a misleading and illegitimate device.”

Misleading and illegitimate of course the title is, its meaning is in a literal sense as Christ’s prolepsis of his resurrection after the crucifixion for the resurgence of the  endangered Christian civilization.   Rather than the literal sense, the title can as well be taken in the metaphorical sense in the context of antithetical civilization whose bases is in the apex of the primary civilization.

With its title appropriate in the metaphorical sense of the word, the poem starts with visionary reflection upon the  hiatus that is inherent in the primary civilization of  Christian dispensation and has  become all the more outstanding with passage of time.  This hiatus relates to the ever increasing distance between the ideal and the real embodied in the poem respectively by the falconer and the falcon.  As A.N. Jeffares has observed: “ the falcon represents man’s  present civilization becoming out of touch with the two thousand years of Christianity.”

Q :   How are present and future linked in the poem “Leda and the Swan”?

Ans :  The consequent breaking down of Leda’s resistance is the consummation of the sexual act represented by the shudder which is occasioned (engendered) in the loins of the two participants in the sexual act.  The outcome of the act is Helen who is responsible not only for the Trojan war (“The broken wall, the burning roof and tower”)  with its burning towers and broken wall and the burning roof-tops but also for the death of Agamemnon, who was killed by his wife.

Q : What does “the rough beast” in “The Second Coming” symbolize?

Ans :   At the center of this vision is a being of the sort of Pablo Picasso’s Minotaur   modeled upon the Egyptian Sphinx, this being has the head of man and the body of tiger.  Having emerged from Spiritus Mundi, it is moving its slow thighs ‘somewhere in the sands of desert”. Though reminiscent of the Palestinian desert, the location of the being’s movement is deliberately keep vague.  This vagueness renders universality to its appearance which previously is vouched by the fact that it  is from Spiritus Mundi, which is Yeats’s  name for the collection Unconscious.  In this location, this being, embodying power and barbarity as the same is moving its slow thighs with a gaze, blank and pitiless like the sun.  Its slouching movement, incompletely specified shape and bland and pitiless gaze are extremely significant in this context.  As T.R. Whitaker  has remarked : “It slouches as an incompletely specified shape, its blank and pitiless gaze and its thighs conveying more in juxtaposition to the  Cradle of Bethlehem than does all Yeats’s  systematic explanation.”

Q : Why does Yeats want his daughter to be brought up and married in a conventional and traditional family?

Ans :   The poet wishes that his daughter may grow up and get married in an aristocratic family which observes traditional manners and courtesies.  There is too much of arrogance and hatred in the common masses today.  Beauty and innocence  come from established custom and usage.  ‘Ceremony’ is like the horn of plenty and custom is like the growing laurel-tree providing shade and comfort to all.   The poet’s love for a traditional aristocratic life is quite obvious.  This  is the way of life which he wants his daughter to follow.  His own experiences with the Irish masses and sadly disillusioned him. However, he had received sympathy that of Lady Gregory.  The aristocracy was for him a  custodian of culture and moral values.

Q : How does the present of the little girls in the class room help Yeats in thinking  of Maud Gonne’s childhood and her future in the poem “Among School Children”?

Ans :   Yeats as a senator had visited many schools.  During his visit to this particular school he is reminded of Maud Gonne’s school days and he recalls bygone days.  He ought to think of that fit of grief or rage (concerning Maud Gonne) he looked upon  one or the other child in the classroom at the school which he had gone to visit as a senator.  As he did that he started wondering what Maud Gonne looked like when  she was a school going child.    Though Maud Gonne was a special case (she being a daughter of the swan i.e., having something divine about her beauty)  still she also had something  common  with the common girls ( ‘every paddler’s heritage’).  As such he was looking for resemblances among the children before him.  As he looked for resemblances.  He wondered if she had the colour of hair or the colour on the cheek which a particular  girl among the school children had.  Immediately his heart went wild because all that reminded him of his loss of Maud Gonne.  At such a moment Maud Gonne alive before his eyes of the imagination as a living child.

Q : Discuss the opening of the poem “Sailing to Byzantium”.

Ans :  The first stanza is full of the sensuality of the country which is not meant for old men.  The young men and women in close embrace, birds in trees, singing out of the excitement of the mating season and fish like salmons and mackerel swimming in the waters of the river and copulating as they move about, fish, flesh and fowl are all caught in the sensual urge of the generation, which is  only a process ending in death.  In this universal  preoccupation with sex and complete inversion is the flux of life.  They can spare to thought for those masterpieces of art which are the product of ageless intellect.

Q : Comment on the image of the bird in “Sailing to Byzantium”.

Ans :   Yeats yearns for the freedom.  Byzantium promises.  He now comes to specify the  artifice of eternity into which he wishes  to be transformed.  He will not take his new form any  natural  thing but the form of the golden bird which was designed by Greek artists to sit upon a golden bough to sing perpetually and  keep the king awake.  This bird’s song is supposed to be different from  the sensual music referred to earlier.  This bird rather will sing of what is past, or passing or to come i.e.,  of past, present and future.

Q : Describe the horrors of war as depicted by Yeats in the fourth stanza of his poem.  “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”.

Ans   The fourth stanza is a powerful comment on the pathos and horror of war.  Days are dragon-ridden (i.e. there is no peace).  Sleep is ruined by nightmares.  Drunken soldiers are capable of getting away untouched even after murdering a mother and leaving her rolling in her own blood at her door.  The nights have once again started trembling and sweating due to terror. They are just like weasels fighting in a hold and yet they tried to think in terms of one world i.e., a government for the whole world.  They were trying to give a philosophic touch to their thoughts while all this was happening.

Q :           What does the image fecund ditch of all’ stand for  in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”?

Ans :   A ditch, rich and fertile in which a blind man falls.  The allusion is to the poet’s blindly falling in love with Maud Gonne.short n