The Poetry of William Butler Yeats
An Introduction to the Poet
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 moving between 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. He quickly rose to literary prominence. Yeats also helped to found what became 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' 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.
A Critical Initiation into Yeats' Poetry
Yeats is one of the greatest poets in the history of Ireland. 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 troubled times. Yeats' great poetic project was to reify his own life--his thoughts, feelings, speculations, conclusions, dreams--into poetry. 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 created 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 for the light it sheds on 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.
No poet of the twentieth century more persuasively imposed his personal experience onto history by way of his art. Yeats' poetry can have a challenging and even baffling impact on contemporary readers as he rendered a critical eye to the age of science, progress, and modernization and sought a mythological vision to answer some of the problems besetting his times. 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.
Selected Poems and Critical Introduction -
The Second Coming
In 'The Second Coming', the speaker describes a nightmarish scene of inconstancy and wild disruption...of a world gone out of joint: 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."
Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, 'The Second Coming' is one of Yeats's most famous and most anthologized poems. 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 and can draw multiple responses in terms of depicting a ' moral crisis' of the times.
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.
'The Second Coming' is not merely a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of A Vision. It is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. Several critics have read the poem as a critique of modernity, scientific rationalism and the ideology of war and imperial domination.
The poem gains its resonance in the contemporary times, each time there is a larger crisis that besets the age. Even otherwise, the aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to ensure its value and its importance in Yeats's work as a whole.
Sailing to Byzantium
'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).
The title speaks of the ancient city of Byzantium which was rebuilt by the Roman emperor Constantine in AD 330 and renamed Constantinople and which is now known as Istanbul. It was the capital of Eastern (Greek) Christianity, and Yeats saw it as a place where, almost uniquely in human history, 'religious, aesthetic and practical life were one'. He said in A Vision that, if he could have a month in antiquity, he would choose to spend it in Byzantium in the sixth century. According to him, the poem 'Sailing to Byzantium' symbolizes the search for the spiritual life by taking a journey to the city of Byzantium. (Page 33, The Poetry Anthology, The Open University, UK.)
The speaker of the poem, 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." Further in the poem, 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."
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 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 a much 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. Hence 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."
'Sailing to Byzantium' is an endlessly interpretable poem, and suggests endlessly fascinating comparisons with other important poems--poems of travel, age, 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 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.
The Wild Swans at Coole
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's core," 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 "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 stanzas 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.
Some Questions and Hints
What is Yeats warning us about in the opening stanzas of the poem 'The Second Coming'?
What are Yeats' views on old age in the poem 'Sailing to Byzantium'?
How is Yeats' poetry influenced by his personal vision?
Hint - refer to his ideas in 'A Vision' briefly
