W. B. Yeat's: His Poetry and Thought - Essay Example

Some time back, I attended a wedding ceremony where the groom read W.B.Yeats well-known poem "When You Are Old" to the bride, and these lines stayed with me: How many loved your moments of glad grace, /And loved your beauty with love false or true;/ But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, /And loved the sorrows of your changing face. I have been reading more of Yeats since, more of his poems, his plays and his life, and it is now clear to me that this man who won the Nobel prize for literature way back in 1923 is still relevant today. Not only is he relevant, he has insightful reactions to the human existence, and is able to put them in small capsules like “ Though leaves are many, the root is one;/Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;/Now I may wither into the truth”.(The Coming of Wisdom with Time, Responsibilities and Other Poems, 1916). Yeats can get away with absolutely cliched poetical language like “loveliness” and still create lines of matchless significance about a womans beauty: “How many centuries spent/The sedentary soul/In toils of measurement/Beyond eagle or mole,/Beyond hearing or seeing, Or Archimedes’ guess,/To raise into being/That loveliness?” (Opening song from the play Fighting the Waves). Of language he was a past master. The themes and subjects of Yeats poetry could be varied, because he was a man of varied interests and pursuits. Yeats could combine simplicity, a concise style, and innate wisdom for commentary on war from a soldiers point of view: “I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above;/ Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love;”An Irish Airman Forsees His Death, The Wild Swans at Coole. 1919). He could make a commentary on the Easter Rising in Ireland like he did with his poem Easter(1916): “Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart./O when may it suffice?/ That is Heavens part, our part /To murmur name upon name,/As a mother names her child /When sleep at last has come /On limbs that had run wild”. Or, he could write with a deep sense of almost Wordsworthian longing for the peace and beatitude of nature: “I will arise and go now, for always night and day/ I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;/ While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,/ I hear it in the deep hearts core”.(The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Rose, 1893). In his final years, Yeats was also known to give expression of his occultist beliefs in a 2000-year cycle of existence: “The darkness drops again but now I know/ That twenty centuries of stony sleep/ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,/ And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”( The Second Coming, Michael Robartes and the Dancer.1919) This range and versatility is the outcome of a lifetime of evolution, because Yeats is one of those rare breed of creative minds who can produce their best work in their waning years. Yeats was born on 13 June 1865, and came from an Anglo-Irish heritage. It was his mother who introduced him to Irish folktales which were to be an important influence on his poetry. He had ideal parents for his profession as a poet : “Yeats has told of the deep emotional reserves in his Sligo-born mother, "whose actions were unreasoning and habitual like the seasons. From his father, John Butler Yeats, a man of original mind who had been trained in the law but turned to painting and to the pre-Raphaelite enthusiasms current in the 70s and 80s, Yeats early heard that "intensity was important above all things." (Bogan, 1938) Yeats was moved to London from Ireland when he was two, and remained there for all his schooling till he enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin for two years in 1884, and here he saw the early beginnings of his poetry. In Dublin he made famous acquaintances like G.B. Shaw, and W.E. Henley, and soon began to publish poetry, and in 1889, came out with The Wanderings of Usheen [Oisin] which included works like The Ballad of Moll Magee, the traditional Irish song Down By The Salley Gardens and the well known The Stolen Child. He began also to make contributions to collections like Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Irish Fairy Tales (1892), and A Book of Irish Verse (1895). But it was in 1889 that he was to meet his unrequited love, Maud Gonne, a poet in her own right as well as a feminist and an actress, who would eventually become the single most important influence in his life. Five years later in 1894, Yeats became acquainted with Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park, who eventually became a friend and patron, and out of this was born The Irish Literary Theater, an important milestone in Irish cultural history. This theater would become the renowned Abbey Theater in 1904 which staged some of Yeatss major plays like The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and The King’s Threshold (1904). By this time, Yeats had already made a name for himself on the English literary scene, with The Lake Isle of Innisfree already published in 1892. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, Yeats went on a series of lecture tours to the United States, and started the Cuala Press in 1904, which printed names like Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bowen, Rabindranath Tagore and so on. Meanwhile his own writing career was flourishing, The Celtic Twilight and The Rose came out in 1893, The Land of Hearts Desire was published in 1894, and the collection The Wind Among the Reeds in 1899. Other remarkable works of this period include Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) which has the famous poems The Second Coming, and A Prayer For My Daughter. These were written after his marriage in 1917 to Georgie (George) Hyde Lees (1892-1968) with whom he had two children. This marriage increased his interest in the occult and the spirit, and this interest percolated into the poetry of the later period of his poetic career. The last period of Yeatss poetry is universally acclaimed to be his deepest, as well as the most spiritually oriented. In 1917 Yeats bought the Norman tower ‘Thoor Ballylee’ near Coole Park in Galway; and The Wild Swans at Coole was published in 1919. In 1922, when civil war broke out in Ireland, Yeats received an Honorary degree from Trinity College, Dublin, and was elected to the Irish senate where he served for six years. During this time Yeats continued to work and published some of his better known works like The Cat and the Moon (1924), A Vision (1925) , and also The Tower (1928) which includes several of his most acclaimed poems like Sailing to Byzantium, Leda and the Swan, and Among School Children. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his inspired poetry, “which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation". Yeats has often been criticized for his style of writing, George Orwell thought Yeats had a “tortured style of writing”, and a “rather sinister vision of life” and finds in Yeatss work that “one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech”. (Orwell, 1943) This is a sort of difficulty in reading Yeats that many readers often experience. But in reading Yeats one has to take into account that he was “by birth and temperament, by the accidents of his upbringing and no less by deliberate and studied choice, the poet of the Irish tradition”. (Stock,1961) So, when reading his poems it may help to remember that Ireland and Irish conventions and meanings are different from those in England and that “it is easy in reading English literature to slip into the assumption that no other values are possible. Much of what Yeats wrote will then look like mere embroideries, or a deliberate shirking of the modern world, when in fact he was true to his own experience and deeply in earnest”. (Stock,1961) Keeping Yeats in his context and gaining a knowledge of Irish folklore and traditions is therefore important for reading Yeats. The second difficulty a reader would come across with the poems of Yeats is the fact they are often obscure, especially in his later years, which often included overtones of various occult and spiritual connotations. The later collections like The Tower require the reader to know and understand a lot about Keatss life during the period, as well as his beliefs. These poems are definitely not self-explanatory, the writings of the later period are a combination of history, philosophy, mysticism, and psychology, but a little bit of background study would prove rewarding. “It may be desirable in poetry that the words on the page should make their full meaning felt without recourse to any ulterior body of knowledge, and the current tendency in criticism is to apply these presuppositions to Yeats: but Yeats was not a new critic, and he knew nothing of its disciplines........it may become classical in Yeats criticism that his poetry does require for its full resolution an ulterior body of knowledge”(Wilson, 1958) But Yeats had the affirmations of another stalwart of twentieth century poet, T.S. Eliot, who paid a tribute to Yeats in the following words, which strikingly sums up Yeatss contribution to English poetry: “There are some poets whose poems can be considered more or less in isolation, for experience and delight. There are others whose poetry, though giving equally experience and delight, has a larger historical importance. Yeats was one of the latter. He was one of the few whose history was the history of our own time, who are part of the consciousness of our age, which cannot be understood without them”. (Eliot, Unterecker, 1963) Works cited Bogan, L.William Butler Yeats, The Atlantic Monthy Biography, May 1938, accessed on 04 May, 2007 at < http://webhome.idirect.com/~francisc/yeats/atlanticbio.htm> Orwell,G. W. B. Yeats, Critical Essays, 1943, accessed on 04 May, at Stock, A. G. W. B. Yeats: His Poetry and Thought. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1961, p. 1-3. Unterecker, J. Yeats: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Place of Publication, 1963, p. 63. Wilson, F. A. C.W. B. Yeats and Tradition. New York: Macmillan, 1958, p.15. Read More