Engliterarium

William Butler Yeats, especially in his earlier poetry, was one of the most important romantic poets, who exerted a great influence on his contemporaries as well as successors. Though, in his later poetry, the modern tradition which he used was opposite to romanticism, however, there is enough in Yeats’ poetry which is unmistakably romantic.

Yeats in his early poetic stage believed in the theory of “art for life’s sake”. But in the nineties, he became the advocate of “art for art’s sake”. Influenced by the French Symbolist and the English Aesthetes he started writing “pure poetry”, free from all the exterior decorations.

Escape from the realities of life is one of the major romantic qualities. Yeats was a greater escapist than Keats and unlike Keats he does not want to come back into reality. Yeats’ early poems made him very popular in the English middle class who wanted to escape from the ugliness and crudity of the industrial civilization. So Yeats was able to carry his readers into a kind of Celtic Twilight. In “Sailing to Byzantium” the poet disgusted with realities of life wishes to escape:

Self-revelation is another romantic trait in Yeats’ poetry. Like Romantics, he also wrote deeply personal poetry revealing his spirit, thoughts, feelings and so on. In “Easter 1916”, he remarks on various persons who had been close with him in his life. In “The Tower”, he is able to sublimate his loss of Maud Gonne. He says:

Love for mythology is both a modern and a romantic trait. Yeats, like Keats, was deeply in love with mythology. His early poems are bound in Irish and Greek mythology. Many of his poems frequently refer to Helen of Troy, Leda, Zeus, Aphrodite and Byzantium. There are dolphins, nightingales, mythological beasts, sphinx-like figures and fairy figures. He loves to go into the world of Byzantium. He says:

A sense of melancholy is a common subject in most of the romantic poets. A kind of lamentation on the disappearance of the good things is found in most of the romantic poets. This sense of melancholy is also found in Yeats’ poetry. He was in love with Maud Gonne but could not win her. So, all through his life, he suffered from his sense of melancholy. He says in “The Wild Swans at Coole” and feels himself defeated:

Another Yeats’ romantic trait is nostalgia for the old Ireland, Maud Gonne and his past. Yeats feels nostalgic in his poem “Among School Children”. He says:

Love for nature is one of the major Romantic traits. It is no exception regarding Yeats. His love for nature can clearly be seen in “The Wild Swans at Coole”. He sees calmness even in winter.

Yeats used a rich imagery in his poetry. He was never fully liberated from the 19th century romanticism despite his denial of romantic diction and romantic imagery. In his early poems he uses the vague and beautiful images of flowers, stars, birds, and mythical figures to escape from the ugliness of his age. But in his later poetry he uses horrible the realistic images like the image of the rough beast, as Yeats says, is:

Yeats stated writing under the influence of Keats. In his early poems, there are many references and parallels to the poetry of Keats. Influenced by Keats, he wishes to escape into an ideal world of Byzantium and to transform into a “golden bird”:

The faculty of Love, too, is regarded as a romantic theme. Yeats wrote a large number of love-poems, but all of them cannot be regarded as romantic. The romantic poets exalt and glorify love. But Yeats’ love is a grand and sublime passion. The early work of Yeats does contain a number of love-poems. His poem “Her Praise” begins with the idea that:

William Butler Yeats was one of the modern poets, who influenced his contemporaries as well as successors. By nature he was a dreamer, a thinker, who fell under the spell of the folk-lore and the superstitions of the Irish peasantry. He felt himself a stranger in the world of technology and rationalism. He is a prominent poet in modern times for his sense of moral wholeness of humanity and history.

Yeats was a realistic poet though his early poetry was not realistic. His later poems, despite realistic accent, are not free from magic and the mysterious world. The First World War and the Irish turmoil gave Yeats a more realistic track. This can clearly be seen in his poem, “Second Coming”, when he says;

Obscurity in Yeats’ poetry is due to his occultism, mysticism, Irish mythology, use of symbolism and theory of ‘Mask’. Yeats was keen to replace traditional Greek and Roman mythological figures with figures from Irish folk lore which results in obscurity. The juxtaposition of the past and the present, the spiritual and the physical, and many such dissimilar concepts and his condensed rich language make his poetry obscure.

Like Eliot, Yeats’ poetry is marked with pessimism. After his disappointment with Maud Gonne and his disenchantment with the Irish National Movement, Yeats started writing bitter and pessimistic poems. But he tried to dispel this feeling by philosophizing in his poems. “To A Shade”, “When Helen Lived”, and two Byzantium poems along with many more of his poems reflect this mood.

Yeats’ mysticism is also a modern trait. Although modern age is scientific, yet modern poetry has traces of mysticism in it. Yeats is the only modern poet who initiated occult system and mysticism in his poetry. Mysticism runs throughout his poetry in which the gods and fairies of the Celtic mythology live again. To Yeats, a poet is very close to a mystic and poet’s mystical experience give to the poem a spiritual world. The state of spiritual exaltation is described in “Sailing to Byzantium”:

Yeats believed in magic as he was anti-rationalist. By ‘Magic’ Yeats meant the whole area of occult knowledge. Occult was very much common in modern poetry for numerology was lately been introduced in 19th century. Most of his symbols have a touch of the supernatural about them. Number 14 is his typical occult number which symbolizes decline. In “The Wild Swans at Coole”, he says:

Being disillusioned by lack of harmony and strength in modern culture, Yeats tried to revive the ancient spells and chant to bring unity and a spirit of integration in modern civilization torn by conflicts and dissensions. Modern man was a disillusioned due to mechanism. All the romances were coming to an end and people were getting brutal. In “Easter 1916” he highlights the disillusionment of modern man. He says:

Yeats was an anti-war poet and does not admire war fought under any pretext. In his last years, he wrote poems dealing with the crumbling of modern civilization due of war. He believed that a revolutionary change is in the offing. In “The Second Coming” he describes what lies at the root of the malady;

Humanism is another modern trait in literature. The threat of war cast a gloomy shadow on the poetic sensibility of the modern poets. The sad realities of life paved the way of humanitarian aspect in modern literature. Yeats’ poetry also abounds in humanism. In “Easter 1916”, he feels even for his rival. He says:

Yeats believed that much chaos has entered in Christianity as it has lost its effect and now it is about to end. The good people sadly lack conviction, while the bad pursue their wicked ends with passionate intensity. The second coming is at hand. This coming prophet will be the prophet of destruction. The falcon, symbolizing intellectual power, has got free of the control of the falconer, representing the heart or soul.

Yeats’ later poetry is typified by a stark, naked brutality and bluntness. His poems present the truth about the human state and he does not hesitate to use blunt and brutal terms to express it. He called spade a spade. He calls the world “the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch”. He says that a man is:

Yeats’ use of symbols in poetry is complex and rich. He was the chief representative of the Symbolist Movement. He draws his symbols from Irish folklore and mythology, philosophy, metaphysics, occult, magic, paintings and drawings. Several allusions are compressed into a single symbol. His symbols are all pervasive key symbols. His key-symbols shed light on his previous poems and “illuminates their sense”. ‘The Rose’, ‘Swan’ and ‘Helen’ are his key-symbols. Symbols give ‘dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies’ in Yeats’ poetry.

One of Yeats’ concerns was old age which is seen as a symbol of the tyranny of time. Rage against the limitations of age and society upon an old man occurs frequently in his poetry. In “Among School Children” he considers himself a comfortable scarecrow. The heart becomes ‘comprehending’, unfortunately attached to a ‘dying animal’. In “The Tower”, Yeats calls the aged body an ‘absurdity’. A powerful expression of Yeats’ agony facing old age appears at the beginning of “Sailing to Byzantium”:

Yeats attitude to old age cannot be typified. Old age is certainly a handicap to the still strong sensual desires. He talks of the limited choices available to an old man who is simply a torn coat upon a stick:

He was both romantic and modern and so talks about balance. In the age of industrialization, man was losing the equilibrium between science and religion. They were destroying their physical beauty by injuring it for the elevation of soul. The balance was lost.

Eliot was contemporary and had a great influence on Yeats. Both have certain things in common. Both are intensely aware of man in history and of the soul in eternity. Both at times see history as an image of the soul writ large. Both see an uncongenial world disintegrating and an unknowable future taking shape in the surrounding dark. Both call in eternity to redress the balance of time.

Yeats is a unique poet as he is a traditional and a modern poet at the same time. Though he started his poetic career as a Romantic and the Raphaelite, he very soon evolved into a genuine modern poet. All the romantic traits found in Yeats early poetry collapsed in his later poetry. Before coming in contact with the Imagist school, he was writing poems, common with the writings of the Imagist Movement. But Yeats symbolism is not derived from that movement. Thus, Yeats is a poet who is both traditional and modern.

Although Yeats used Irish mythology in his early poems, yet he is not simply intent to retell the Irish legends. Yeats’ impulse to transcend his folk-lore material is a constant pre-occupation with him. As an Irishman, he is passionately attached to his country by ties of ancestors and pride in his country’s history and legends. He gradually became disillusioned when he felt the violence and hatred of the Irish political leaders.

The use of the inherited subject-matter and the mythology of Ireland were not something educational or poetic in a simple way but something more deeply political.

Yeats is keen to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland. His attempt is to revive the folk art which he considered to be the golden dream of the king and peasant. To Yeats Irish folk tales were one of he principal sources from which the Irish imagination might strengthen itself by drinking from the fountains of tradition.

For Yeats the most powerful influence came from John O’Leary, a great Irish patriot. Yeats himself acknowledged this debt:

It was through the old Ferian leader John O’Leary I found my theme.

Yeats not only lived in the troubled modern era but also lived in a country where trouble was brewing all the time. His poem “September 1913” relates to a municipal controversy in Dublin in the year 1913 which involved for Yeats the dignity of culture in Ireland and the hope for an Irish literary and artistic revival. In this sense, “September 1913” is a pierce attack on the whole city of Dublin. “To a Shade”, one of the most significant Irish poems of Yeats, is addressed to Parnell.

Another great Irish poem is “Easter 1916”. For Yeats Easter uprising of 1916 came to have a great significance. For Yeats, people involved in this uprising had changed everything. The poem shows Yeats’ modified attitude of admiration for the Irish revolutions and martyrs. It is an attempt to move not only into the public world but into a great flow of public world which is called history.

All changed, changed utterly
A terrible beauty is born.

It is an attempt to renew the Irish revolution by restoring its soul. The poem like “The Seven Sages”, also tackles Irish themes. Yeats has been described as a last of the romantics and the first of the moderns. It means he carried both romanticism and modernism. He is an Irish poet. He is very much concerned with Irish history, Irish folk-lore and Irish struggle for independence. Yeats enjoyed the sound of words and used them to create rich texture in his poetry. We notice his use of Irish place-names and the names of figures in Irish legend and history.

At the same time, we must not forget that Yeats’ Irishness was always primarily literary and artistic, much more than political. Yeats’ Irishnesss was thus concerned more with the cultivation of the taste of Irish people than with the struggle of parties group around him.

Yeats’ Nationalism at the same time was liberal and broad based as it is very clear from his repeated attacks on narrow-minded nationalists. Yeats, in fact, gradually moved away from the contemporary fanaticism of Iris politics, but as the poem like “Easter 1916” makes it crystal clear, even in his disillusionment with Irish fanaticism, Yeats never stopped responding quickly and sincerely to the heroism of martyrs, some of whom he may not have liked personally.

What is it but nightfall?

The second section of the poem sketches the personalities of the nationalists before their destruction in the Easter rising. Maud Gonne was one of them, beautiful when young, had spoiled her beauty in the favor of politics agitation. Another was the poet and the school teacher. A third had shown sensitivity and intellectual daring, a fourth has seemed only a drunken vain. The beauty which is born out of these deaths is a terrible beauty.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?

Yeats’ sense of his own identity and function as a poet began to take shape in the context of Irish nationalism and shows his deliberate and many sided effort to provide the Irish national movement some finer notice than mere hatred of the English.

Yeats complained of the political class in Ireland, the lower middle from which the patriotic associations have drawn their leaders for the past ten years. These people are burning in fire of deep hatred for English.

The poem contains the result of Yeats’ contemplation on the real nature of these people’s sacrifices who last their lives in the Easter uprising of 1916. At the same time Yeats succeed in conveying that the Irish people sacrifices in their freedom struggle were prolonged and spread over a long period.

I said, “All line will take us hours may be;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

Yeats’ poetry is replete with symbols. He has been called “the chief representative” of the Symbolist Movement in English literature. Indeed Yeats uses innumerable symbols and sometimes he uses the same symbol for different purposes in different context. Often he coins symbols from his study of the occult, Irish folklore and mythology, magic, philosophy, metaphysical, paintings and drawings which are generally unfamiliar to the readers.

It is true that French Symbolist Movement has a great impact on Yeats. But despite this fact, Yeats’ use of symbols differs from that of them, in several ways.

Yeats makes use of a complex system of symbols in his poems. In Yeats’ own words “a symbol is indeed, the possible expression of some invisible essence…...”. Yeats’ symbols are not merely denotative, but also connotative and evocative. In Yeats’ poetry generally symbols are of two kinds; the traditional and the personal as his repeated symbol of “Rose”. It is both a traditional as well as a personal symbol. Yeats’ symbols are also all pervasive key-symbol. A key-symbol sheds light on the previous poems and illuminates their sense. “Rose”, “Swan”, and “Helen” are key-symbols.

The ‘rose’ in Yeats’ poem is generally used to mean earthly love but in “The Rose of the World” it also symbolizes eternal love and beauty. In “The Rose of Battle” the rose is a refuge from earthly love. The symbol, thus, becomes complex and has to be read carefully in the context in which it is used.

The symbol of ‘dance’ is closely related to Yeats’ “system” and is often employed in his poetry. It gives the meanings on the one hand, of a patterned movement, joyous energy and on the other hand, at times, a kind of unity. The symbol of dance evokes the concept of unity in “Among School Children”.

O body swayed to music, O brightened glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Hence, the ideal state of balance and unity is associated with the symbols of dance.

‘Byzantium’ represents perfection and unity in Yeats’ poems. He feels that Byzantium symbolizes perfection, which the world has never known before. He believes that in Byzantium, all spheres of life are united; there is no fragmentation (Anarchy). In “Sailing to Byzantium” Byzantium becomes the symbol of perfection, free from the cycle of birth and death and also free from time because it is a world of art and an ideal existence, where is neither death nor decay.

The symbol of ‘bird’ is one of the most important symbols in Yeats’ poems. It is a striking example of the dynamic nature of the Yeatsian symbol, which grows, changes and acquires greater depth and destiny in their progression. The symbol of ‘Falcon’ is also very important. In “The Second Coming” Yeats says that modern world is disintegrating and leading to chaos.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

A similar process may be traced in the ‘beast imagery’. The sphinx “a shape with lion body and the head of a man”, in “The second Coming” represents the end of the Christianity. Yeats’ uses this symbol with reference to his occult system.

In “The Tower” Tower is both a traditional and a personal symbol. It is used to suggest loneliness, national heritage and blood thirstiness. In another poem, “A prayer for my Daughter”, the tower suggest Yeats’ vision of the dark future of humanity.

Yeats is disgusted with old age, for this he uses the symbol of ‘Scarecrow’. He shows his disgust with old age in “Among School Children” saying:

Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird

There are a lot of other symbols in Yeats’ poetry. So, to sum up, we can say that Yeats’ use of symbol is complex and rich. Symbols, indeed, give “Dump things Voices, and Bodiless things Bodies” in Yeats’ poetry. The ‘rose’, the ‘swan’, the ‘tower’, the ‘winding stairs’ and the ‘spinning tops’ – all assume a life of their own and speak to the reader of different things.