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ENG: 401 20th-Century Poetry (Reference Guide)

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Razon Mahmood:
Major Themes in W.B Yeats' Poetry
Age and Death

Though a young poet at the time of the composition of The Rose, Yeats is quite preoccupied with themes of aging and mortality. Imagining his old age served as an escape for the young Yeats, who found himself unsuccessful in love and imagined that later in life he would either have won his beloved or his beloved would have come to regret her rejection of him. "In Old Age" is particularly marked by the image of an older Maud Gonne (the woman with whom Yeats was in love) becoming wiser in old age.

Yeats also had an anxiety about death which was unusual in someone so young. He contemplated death less in terms of himself than in terms of his loved ones. When Maud Gonne traveled to France as a convalescent, a worried Yeats wrote "A Dream of Death." This meditation on Gonne's possible death is less of a nightmare than a dream come true, as Yeats envisions himself being useful to her in death as he could not be in life. Yeats, therefore, views both aging and death as more or less positive forces.

Images of Irish Nature

It is not surprising that a collection entitled The Rose draws heavily upon nature imagery. Yeats draws upon natural imagery both in terms of the symbols he employs and in the settings he summons. Indeed, natural imagery features in all of Yeats's poetry, even that which contains political themes.

Yeats's landscape descriptions are often obviously Irish, even if they do not include a specific place name. He highlights the rolling greenness and shifting light that characterize the Irish landscape. Additionally, some of his poems take a more specific approach to the Irish landscape. Many of them, including "The Lake Isle of Inisfree," treat a particular Irish place. Nearly all of these places are in County Sligo, Yeats' mother's ancestral home and the place on earth that he felt most connected to. Yeats was eventually buried in Sligo.

Yeats also references the natural landscapes of Irish legend and myth. Imaginary natural worlds like Faeryland or Tir na nOg, where people never grow old, provide a compliment to both the general and specific treatments of Irish nature. In all his poems, Yeats carefully chooses a natural backdrop - real or imagined - that captures his home country.

Irish Mythology

The Rose is rife with mythological references, from King Fergus to Conchubar to Diarmuid. Indeed, such mythic Irish figures populate nearly every poem in the collection.

Mythology operates as a theme in this collection in a number of ways. First and foremost it separates Yeats' poetry from British writing. British writers drew on Roman and Greek mythology - the mythology, in fact, of other (albeit ancient) imperialists. In choosing Irish mythology as his source of allusions and subjects, Yeats creates a poetry distinct from that of Ireland's long-time oppressors. This compliments Yeats' desire to cultivate a poetic language suitable to Ireland alone.

Moreover, Yeats' use of Irish mythological subjects allows him to avoid the political climate of his own day. Yeats, a moderate compared to his beloved Maud Gonne, found his political beliefs to be a burden in his pursuit of love. In treating legendary figures, Yeats avoids the problem of referencing the complicated political environment that so tormented him.

For a fuller discussion of the specific mythology that Yeats draws on, see the Additional Content section in this ClassicNote.

Irish Nationalism

Nationalism in Ireland in the 1890s was in a complicated stage. Many die-hard Fenians (Republicans), including Maud Gonne, were more than willing to take arms against the British to gain their independence. Another group, including Yeats, took the more cautious parliamentary approach. This political party, called the Home Rule Party, was led by John Redmund and held that Ireland could gain independence through legal means.

Because this collection focuses so much on Maud Gonne, Yeats inevitably touches upon his political differences with his beloved. These differences, needless to say, affected their relationship negatively. Yeats feared that Gonne was more repulsed by his moderate politics than by his person.

Thus, in some poems, such as "To Ireland in the Coming Times," Yeats seems to be willfully disassociating himself from the complex political fabric of his own era, instead hearkening to a simpler politics of ancient kings. Undoubtedly Yeats was drawn to these ancient mythic times anyway, but his interest takes on a sadness in the context of his relationship with the politics of his own day (and thus of his relationship with Gonne). Nationalist politics exist negatively in these poems, as the subject that Yeats doesn't want to address.

Maud Gonne

At the time that Yeats published this collection, Maud Gonne was the major focus of his life. He was deeply in love with her, and although Gonne did not return his romantic sentiments, she remained close friends with him. He saw her often enough to become obsessed with her. Most of the poems in the collection were written for or about Gonne.

The central image of the rose is a symbol of Gonne as well as Ireland. Gonne, an extreme nationalist, represents the Irish spirit in her politics as well as her beauty. Thus Gonne, Ireland and the image of the rose exist interchangeably in Yeats' poetic imagination. His beloved, with her violent desire to free her country from British rule, captures the ferocity of nationalistic pride with spiritual and physical beauty. She is the thorny rose, and the thorny rose is Ireland. Indeed, one of Yeats' fears is that he himself is not violent enough politically or personally to attract Gonne's attentions, a fear that seemed to be justified by her marriage to a military man.

Urbanization

Ireland is, historically, an agrarian land. For centuries it was a nation of farmers - often working under unfair conditions for their British conquerers. Thus, though Ireland's agrarian identity was complicated, it was central. A rapport with the change of seasons and with the harvest cycle was central to Irish life.

At the time of the composition of The Rose, however, urbanization had begun to encroach upon Ireland. Dublin was a major metropolitan area, for instance, in the heart of a traditionally rural society. This complex relationship between urban and rural existence is essential to Yeats' perspective in The Rose. Though he lived much of his life in London and Dublin, Yeats viewed cities as inherently negative and poisonous. Thus poems like "The Lake Isle of Inisfree," which romanticize the Irish agrarian landscape with breathless awe, largely express the poet's discomfort with his urban environment.

It is worth asking, then, whether Yeats' natural landscapes of Ireland are realistic or purely imaginative. They seem to exist largely in the poets remembrance and longings - to be places of escape from a modernity that Yeats finds discomfiting. Yeats invites the conclusion that, in fact, it doesn't matter whether his Ireland is the real Ireland: it is, nevertheless, a place of meaning for the Irish.

Thus Yeats expresses a desire to capture in imaginative verse the spirit of Ireland - its symbols, mythology, people, nature - that might well be lost in the encroaching press of nationalism and urbanization. Yeats, in short, writes against the city, but also from the city. He cultivates an imaginative place of escape that is only necessary because of the coming modernity.

Retrieved from- http://www.gradesaver.com/poems-of-wb-yeats-the-rose/study-guide/major-themes/

Razon Mahmood:
Thank you Shahriar for posting the link. The contain is very much informative. I haven't read Rabindranath Tagore very much expect a few novels and short stories. It's really very prestigious matter for us that the great poets and writers all over the world were interested in Rabindranath Tagore.        

kulsum:
dear Rajon,

Thank you for your post. This is certainly a good collection about Yeats specially the Nationalism part. Hope everyone will be benefited. Please keep on posting and be updated.

Well done!

UK mam

kulsum:
 here are some discussion abt The Wild Swans at Coole


Hmm perhaps look at the first two lines;

THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,

That essentially sets the setting. Everything else is downhill from here, since he is getting old.

The next 4 lines seem to set the moment however, when he writes;

Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones 5
Are nine and fifty swans. (great rhyme with stones and swans)

The moment of course, he is commenting, is beautiful. October is, in my opinion, being used here to symbolize again autumn, and the coming of the end of his middle years, turning into his later years. The swans here are representing the fruits of his years, his achievement and pleasures, his desires and enjoyments, but they are placed right beside October, symbolizing their migration south, and their disappearance from his life.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount 10
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.


This second stanza is probably the most central for the development. It implies that he had started feeling his time was running out. 1900 being a significant year, not only because of the turn of the century, but also because of his rejections from Maude Goone, to whom he proposed marriage in 1899, 1900, and 1901. The last lines of this poem seem to show the sudden fading of everything, symbolized again with the departing swans.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, 15
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread

This stanza seems to be attempting to appeal to the emotions he is feeling. He is commenting that he has enjoyed these things, looked on them, watched them, but now they are different. He feels them growing older as well, and slower, and lighter, symbolizing the increasing difficulty of life, and its lack of reward. The Trod with a Lighter Tread is also a reference to his life, and the responsibility and carefulness that comes with age. It is contrasted to a younger, less worrisome life that he has left behind.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold, 20
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

Now he is distancing himself, as the poet, from the swans. They now appear to seem like everyone else, that is, the next generation, the young. They are not old, and they are still experiencing the fruits of youthfulness, personified in the "unwearied still, lover by lover," and "passion or conquest, wander where they will," These lines seem to isolate the poet from the swans, since he is now to old to enjoy the same feelings they have. He has responsibilities, age, and loneliness to deal with. His passion is ebbing, and he is too old to "paddle in the cold / companionable streams or climb the air;" He essentially caps this off with the last line, "attend upon them still" proving that he no longer has these abilities, but is bound to another fate, all kept in mind with the concept of autumn that is running through the whole poem.


But now they drift on the still water 25
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

He returns here to the concept of the moment, commenting on how he is enjoying the last of them, but acknowledging that one day he will awake to find they have moved on, literally south, symbolically to the next generation. The "when I awake some day" is symbolic again of age and hinting at death, capped off with "to find they have flown away?" the poem seems to be pushing now away from the concept of the moment, into the concept of age, saying essentially, in my opinion, "but I have some time left, but it is running out."

Overall this is one of Yeats' most famous and most anthologized poems. The metre and rhymes seem to give it a perfect rhythm for memorization (which I invite all of you to undertake with me) and also a liquid, water-like flow, seeming to echo his swans. The images remain significant because they deal with an experience all of us must feel to some extent or another. The deep meaning, which sets it apart from other poems, I find, however, is that it is not an age makes you wise statement, as seen in the bible, or an age makes you foolish statement, as seen in King Lear, but rather a depiction of the aging man from his perspective, showing the emptiness, loneliness, and desperation of a man waiting for the time to come when he can no longer enjoy all that he values. 
     

JBI
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 05-18-2008, 01:36 PM    #23 
Quark
Of Subatomic Importance
 
 
 

Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 1,368  Quote:
Originally Posted by sofia82 
We can interpret the poem as he's feairng of losing his power as the poet and being unable to write poetry as well as he wrote in his passionate and delightful youth. Nineteen years ago, there were nine and fifty swans, and now they are flying away, what will happen to his artistic power when he becomes old.

Originally I found this interpretation rather doubtful, but looking back at the last stanza I think it's actually quite applicable. Yeats writes

Quote:
But now they drift on the still water 25
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away? 

If the still water represents the serenity of his old age, why are the swans, who represent the water's opposite, floating on it? And, if the swans represent the poet's youthful passion why does he speculate about where they might go? Youthful passions don't relocate; they weaken and then disappear. Poetry, however, can be considered transfered between people. It is something that will "delight men's eyes."


Quote:
Originally Posted by sofia82 
19 years ago they were 59, now they are 59. Maybe there will be 59 in the future, as Yeats wrote his best poetry when he was old (after fifties).

JBI recently suggested that the 19 years is connected with the year 1900, which makes some sense. What about the 59 swans, though? Why does he pick that number, or why does he even bother to specify the number?


Quote:
Originally Posted by sofia82 
I agree with Dark Muse. It represents a kind of hope inspite of his soubting it. If it were a statement, yes it could be hopeless end, but he is not sure and he is asking about this end.

Those lines refer to the swan, and not the poet or his present condition.


Quote:
Originally Posted by JBI 
The moment of course, he is commenting, is beautiful. October is, in my opinion, being used here to symbolize again autumn, and the coming of the end of his middle years, turning into his later years. The swans here are representing the fruits of his years, his achievement and pleasures, his desires and enjoyments, but they are placed right beside October, symbolizing their migration south, and their disappearance from his life.
 

Razon Mahmood:
Thank you Mam for inspiring us. The idea (writing our thoughts about the subject) is really appreciative.   

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