W.B. Yeats and his major Poems
W.B. Yeats and his major Poems
Block - 9 - Unit 42, 43 and 44
This file contains notes
for -
1.
Modernist
poets
2.
Difference
between Yeats 2 phases
3.
Life
of WB Yeats
4.
Adam’s
Curse
5.
No
second Troy
Unit
-44 - The later Poetry of WB Yeats
Easter
1916
Sailing
to Byzantium
Lapis
Lazuli
______________________________________________
Que- "The Victorian poets lacked the fire and
passion which we find in the poets of the Romantic Revival, but they excelled
them in breadth of outlook and variety of method." Discuss. - II- (Asked thrice in previous question
papers)
Answer is in
IGNOU Book- Block-9 Modernist Poets Unit-42 in 42.2.
Unit-42
42.2 - THE END OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
The contrast of the
poetry Hardy and Hopkins offered to contemporary models lies in their use of
ambiguity and shifting tonalities, their adoption of an ironic mode in short.
At times, Hardy's poetry seems to be boldly experimental, characterised by
frequent flashes of daring imagination. His experiments orchestrate the use of
dialect words, abbreviations, archaisms, and 'kennings' (or verbal riddles in
the style of Anglo-Saxon poetry), some of which would be found barbaric
according to orthodox aesthetics. Nevertheless, Hardy functions largely within
the traditional forms, presenting the drama of unresolved contradictions: he
has himself described his poems as unadjusted impressions. If he tended to
relate the local and individual to cosmic pessimism, he was characteristically
tentative, holding his judgement in suspense. Ultimately his vision is ironic,
involving the rapid and unsettling juxtaposition of images and
counter-perceptions that anticipates modernist techniques. Both Robert Bridges
and Hopkins experiment with prosody. The former's attempts stem from Greek and
Latin prosody, resulting in much charm and delicacy at the cost of poetic
concentration and intensity. For these qualities we must go to Hopkins whose
'sprung rhythm,' borrowed from Anglo-Saxon prosody, was reinforced by fresh
imagery and compact structure. By keeping the number of stressed syllables
fixed and varying the number of unstressed syllables, Hopkins was able to
revive the 'Metaphysical' mode linking it to modern poetry. This mode,
submerged through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was characterised,
by ingenious analogy-the extended or cryptic 'conceit -the yoking of contraries
and irregular rhythm and diction. Such a sensibility was sharply different
from the Romantic and Victorian, banishing the bogey of 'high seriousness' from
the concept of poetry and locating the poem's value not in ideas or
autobiography but in the psychological process of creation in the poet's mind.
In this sense, the modem movement amounts to a rejection of expressivist
categories in favour of the Aristotelian theory of mimetic representation,
although the former were never suppressed. The modem poet's unconscious was a
storehouse of heterogeneity stinging him obscurely, prompting him, as it were,
to get rid of excessively accumulated experience. The disparateness and breadth
of the cultural tradition made for impersonality of expression. The
'metaphysical' poet brought together dissimilars-secular and divine love, for
instance so that the discord plunged him deep into the theme, the greater
awareness of the conflict demanding greater poetic technique.
The trauma of the First
World War was first expressed by poets. They saw the War as organized and
motivated insanity: their poetry bore witness to the ugly truth seen through
the eyes of the common soldier.
Imagism-
A threefold Imagistic
manifesto was announced in the magazine Poetry
in March 1913:
(i) direct
treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective
(ii)scrupulous avoidance
of any word that did not contribute to the presentation
(iii)rhythmical
composition in the sequence of the musical phrase, not of a metronome.
Among the poets
originally grouped as Imagist were Pound himself, Amy Lowell, H.D. Richard
Aldington, and John Gould Fletcher. Soon divisions surfaced, especially between
Pound and Amy Lowell; in any case, the anthologies often included poets like
D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce.
Difference between Keats
two poetic phases:
The poetic life of W.B.
Yeats falls into two phases, earlier and later, opposed to each other.
In his early poetry,
Yeats wishes to escape to a dreamy fairyland, in the later poetry the nostalgia
is of the spirit, for a world of pure ideas. The poetic influence of the
Pre-Raphaelites as well as his early interest in the occult fortified his opposition
to mechanistic conceptions of the universe, an opposition that remains a common
link among modem writers otherwise widely different from each other. Yeats's
early poetry is characterized by somnolent rhythms, symbolist evocativeness and
obscure mystic calls. that gave this mixture credibility was his peculiarly
ambivalent Anglo-Irish identity: as a member of the Protestant Ajglo-Norman
Ascendancy, Yeats was passionately involved in Irish politics and yet
distrustful of its nationalist zeal. He was no doubt drawn into politics by his
unrequited love for Maud Gonne; at the same time, he remained aloof discovering
a mythically resonant, tragic heroi.sm in the htile Easter Rebellion.
He introduced Vorticism.
(a
British artistic movement of 1914–15 influenced by cubism and futurism and
favouring harsh, angular, machine-like forms.) , as a movement, was a
continuation of Imagism and its dynamic interplay of images.
Eliot's
use of an organized whole, a web of relationships, seems to have been inspired
by the notion of gestalt in contemporary psychology. The gestalt
psychologists believed that a random collection of marks or dots on a page
would reveal a certain pattern or design to the observing spectator. If these
marks were re-distributed continuously, the effect would never be that of
disorder but of constantly renewed configurations. Thus we have in Eliot's
poetry the genesis of a fonn that is harmonious without being closed or rigid,
characterised, rather, by its appetite for inclusiveness. Such a form is no
doubt exemplified by The Waste Land.
UNIT 43 W.B. YEATS: BACKGROUND, SYSTEM, AND POETIC
CAREER UP TO 191 0
Facts:
1.
William
Butler Yeats was
born in Ireland to John Butler Yeats, a painter, and Susan Pollexfen, who came
from a family of shipowners, june 13 1865
2.
W.B.
Yeats won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.
3.
His
poetic career moves from the pre-modern to the modern: he was master of both
the styles.
4.
when
we quarrel with others we produce rhetoric but when we quarrel with ourselves
we produce poetry, - Yeats
5.
The
three central symbols of the mask, the moon, and the gyres. The mask, we have
seen, is fundamentally a theatrical metaphor while the moon suggests fickle
fortune and the associative cluster of female fertility, virginity, and
sensuality. The gyres give new meaning to the childhood experience
6.
The
poetic career of Yeats falls into an early and a later phase, each apparently
opposed to the other.
a.
-
In the early phase his specific mode of release was somewhat escapist, his
fancy spiriting him away from a busy London street to the fairyland of Sligo
and its lake isles.
b.
in
the period 19 10- 14, Yeats moves away from his earlier misty symbolism and mythology
to concrete, realistic detail. Yeats's style becomes more supple and
economical. In ResponsibiIities (1 914), Yeats chooses his new poetic persona
by openly declaring that he was stripping off his coat
Work
-
The
Lake Isle of Innisfree', 'The Stolen Child', Crossways, essay,
'Ireland and the Arts' (Essays and Introductions), The Celtic 7'wilight (1 893,
revised and enlarged 1902), play- At the Hawk's Well (1 9 16), 'September
1913’, A Vision (1925, revised 1937), The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), Crossways
(1889), The Rose (1 893), The Wind Among the Reeds (1 899), the Seven Woods
(1904), Adam’s Curse(1902), 'Byzantium' poems, 'Lapis Lazuli', No Second troy,
The Green Helmet, 'Easter 19 16' 'Sailing to Byzantium', Responsibilities (1
914), Zle Wild Swans at Coole (1919) and Michael Robaries and the Dancer (1
921), 'Upon a Dying Lady' and 'A Prayer for My Daughter' look forward to
'Meditations in Time of Civil War,' 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,' 'Coole
Park, 1929,' 'Coole Park and Ballylee, 193 1 , 'The Double Vision of Michael
Robartes,' 'Ego Dominus Tuus,' and 'The Phases of the Moon.', The Second
Coming'.
Love
Life:
He
met Maud Gonne in 1889, an encounter that was to transform his life. His
infatuation for her drew him into nationalist politics.
Yeats
came to play an increasingly important role in Irish public life becoming a
Senator of the Irish Free State (1922-28) and winning the Nobel Prize in
1923.
Maud
Gonne's stubborn refusal to marry him led to his happy marriage to George Hyde Lees
in 1896.
Maud
Gonne married Major John MacBride in 1903.
Ezra
Pound was his secretary from 19 13-16
Adam’s Curse:
3
stanzas of uneven number of lines.
Rhyme
Scheme - AABBCC
Heroic
Couplet
Written
in 1902, before the marriage of Maud Gonne to Major John MacBride, the whole
poem is a controlled expression of Yeats's futile love for her. The very title
of the poem indicates loss of innocence and idyllic happiness. In the fallen
state of humanity, art as labour co-extensive with life brings together poetry,
feminine beauty, and love.
It is
a conversation-poem involving Maud Gonne, her sister,Mrs. Kathleen Pilcher, and
Yeats himself. It is addressed to Maud Gonne but Maud remains enigmatically silent
and unresponsive throughout.
Maud
Gonne's fiery beauty presents an alternative to Yeats; the poet is located
between the two, pulled towards both, towards involvement and withdrawal.
The
second stanza offers a racy defence of poetry in a society increasingly
dominated by the emerging bourgeois ideology. This new world, summed up by the
bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen, was aggressively hostile to art and
distrustful of the vital energies.
In
the fourth stanza to the lover emulating the artifice of the mask. As Yeats
puts it, 'Each divines the secret self of the other, and refusing to believe in
the mere daily self, creates a mirror where the lover or the beloved sees an
image to copy in daily life; for love also creates the Mask'
'NO SECOND TROY'
Helen
of Troy and Trojan war of Troy
Maud
Gonne is here a real individual despite being identified with Helen of Troy in
terms of personal symbolism. The Trojan war, which ended with the destruction
of Troy by the Greeks after a ten-year siege, began because Helen (wife of
Menelaus, King of Sparta) was abducted by Paris, son of Priam, King of Troy.
Her whole situation including the context of the Trojan War (on which Homer's
epics are based) offer a parallel with a difference to Maud Gonne, Yeats, John
MacBride and Irish nationalism. After repeatedly refusing Yeats, Maud Gonne
finally married MacBride, one of the revolutionaries executed in 191 6, in 1903
but was separated from him in 1906. When she appeared in the Abbey Theatre on
20 October 1906 after her divorce, the audience hissed at her (see 'Against
Unworthy Praise'); after this she withdrew from public life until 1918. That
kind of public reaction sums up the narrow-minded ideology of hatred that
characterised the lower middle classes in particular.
: in
'No Second Troy,' she is shown to have 'taught ignorant men most violent ways.'
The poem places personal experience in the turmoil of Irish history and widens
out to heroic myth: history becomes myth even as myth is linked to
history. The comparison of her beauty to a tightened bow not only
suggests the tensile and arched grace of her body but also the energy of
stress, a taut and tense sexuality.
Unit
-44 - The later Poetry of WB Yeats
Easter
1916
Sailing
to Byzantium
Lapis
Lazuli
____________________________________
'EASTER
1916'
written
in September 1916, is the Easter Rising in Dublin against British colonial
rule. The Irish Republic was proclaimed on Easter Monday, 24 April 19 16, and
the heart of the city occupied by the Republican rebels. Managing to hold out
until 29 April, they were defeated and many of their leaders tried and
executed.
The
list of his friends begins with Constance Gore-Booth (1 868-1927) in the second
stanza; her condition is described also in 'On a Political Prisoner' and 'In
Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz.' Although she took part in the
Rebellion, her death sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life; she was
later released.
Patrick
Pearse (1 879-1916), the founder of a boys' school, a member of the Irish Bar
and an orator. 'This other' refers to Thomas Mac Donagh (1 878- 19 1 G), poet,
dramatist, critic, and academic whose literary sensibility and regard for
Celtic tradition were crushed by mechanical logic so fashionable in Ireland at
that time. Next in line is Major John MacBride (1 865-191 G), Maud Gonne's
husband, who had fought against the British in the Boer War. James Connolly (1
870-1916), a trade unionist, who had organized the Citizen Army and was
military commander of all Republican forces in Dublin and Commandant in the Post
Office during the Rising.
The
change from motley to green in the last stanza indicates a new meaning to life,
a rejuvenation. The first two stanzas of the poem deal with change while the
third and fourth accomplish a neat ironic reversal by interpreting that change
as a stone-hearted, tragic incapacity for change.
Transitional
poem.
SAILING
TO BYZANTIUM
Born
incomplete, man attains completeness in so far as he conceives of it; if the
hero does this unconsciously, the poet does it consciously.
Published
in 1928 in Towers.
'Sailing
to Byzantium,' one of Yeats's masterpieces, is organized around the dichotomy
of flesh and spirit, nature and art where the sea symbolizes the energetic
vitality of the former. As Yeats advanced into old age he continued to be
troubled by the passions. The voyage in the poem is thus an inner spiritual
voyage towards wisdom and freedom from enslavement to nature. Quite apart from
the special meaning that Byzantium has in Yeats's system, historically it was
the meeting-point of the pagan and Christian civilisations.
The
poem begins when the voyage is already under way.
The second
stanza moves in thematic sequence from youth to age. As we have seen above,
physical decay makes the skin-and-bones appearance comparable to a tattered
coat upon a stick, skin and flesh hanging loose. the body is a coat that the
soul puts on at birth and takes off at death which thus becomes a mode of
ecstatic liberation.
the
third stanza introduces us to the sages through the golden mosaic art on the
wall. As Yeats calls upon the sages to be the singing-masters of his soul, he
links the two worlds of sage and sensual man, the rival intensities of art and
life, through the gyres.
In
the final stanza the mechanical bird, a work of Grecian or Byzantine
craftsmanship, is hammered out of gold, the imperishable metal that like the
soul survives the fire. Apart from the paradox of the desire to escape from
desire, the intensely passionate plea to cauterize the passions, there is a
further paradox here. The hammering with the reiterated sound pattern of
'hammered gold and gold enamelling
In
the first stanza birds in the trees produce sensual music. In the second stanza
they are replaced by the scarecrow ('a tattered coat upon a stick'), an image
of ugliness and decay in 'Among School Children1 -the mask of 'a comfortable
kind of old scarecrow' or the Greek philosophers as 'Old clothes upon old
sticks to scare a bird.' The song of the old man's soul takes us to the sages
or the singing-masters in the third stanza-here the submerged image of the
phoenix (the bird rising out of its own ashes) merges into that of the poem
which also means a small hawk. Finally there is the golden mechanical bird
singing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium.
'Lapis
Lazuli'
It is
a 56 line poem dedicated to Harry Clifton. The poems are organized like sculptural planes,
a method singularly appropriate to the Chinese carving in lapis lazuli, a blue
precious stone, presented to Yeats on his seventieth birthday by Henry Clifton
to whom the poem is dedicated.
The
poem begins under the shadow of the impending World War (July 1936): events
like the Spanish Civil War, the German re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936
and the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 built up a climate of hysteria in
which poetry seems to be nothing more than an idle trade. The hysterical women
betray their masks of nurturing femininity and in rejecting art in favour of politics
peddled in the thoroughfares they reject custom, ceremony and the contemplative
life.
The
entire second stanza is built around theatre imagery reminiscent of Shakespeare
and Renaissance drama. Related to the doctrine of the mask, the metaphor of the
actor is one of self-making whereby man becomes an increasingly conscious agent
of his own history and not the bewildered, passive victim taking refuge in
'hysterica passio.' The moment of death thus becomes a pyrrhic victory,
paradoxically the moment of self-consciousness.
In
the fourth stanza Yeats describes the actual sculpture in lapis lazuli.
In
the final stanza, we seem to leave behind the panoramic perspective to examine
minutely
the actual sculpture. Every detail-discoloration, crack or dent-on the crafted
surface
is closely observed and simultaneously transformed into symbol
In
'Lapis Lazuli' we are as it were inside the theatre, simultaneously involved in
and detached from the performance of our lives.
'Lapis Lazuli' is
constructed around the general theme of art and tragic joy. lapis lazuli, a
blue precious stone, presented to Yeats on his seventieth birthday by Henry
Clifton to whom the poem is dedicated.
Several of Yeats's
life-long themes are brought together:
- the recurring rise and fall of
civilisations,
- the millennial vision of the
approaching end of European civilisation,
- the triumph of art and
philosophy over ruin.
The poem begins under
the shadow of the impending World War (July 1936). The bomb-balls refer to 'The
Battle of the Boyne,' a ballad included in Irish Minstrelsy.
The parallel
between King William of Orange (King Billy in Irish colonial memory) and Kaiser
Bill or Kaiser Wilhelm 11, German emperor at the time of the First World War,
and the impending Second World War introduces the theme of the cyclical
recurrence of history which is developed particularly in the third
stanza.
The
entire second stanza is built around theatre imagery reminiscent of Shakespeare
and Renaissance drama.
Callimachus
was a late fifth-century B.C. Greek sculptor who was the reputed inventor of
the Corinthian capital (head or cornice of pillar or column).
In
the fourth stanza Yeats describes the actual sculpture in lapis lazuli. a great
piece carved by some Chinese sculptor into the semblance of a mountain with
tempIe, trees, paths and an ascetic and pupil about to climb the mountain.
The
long-legged crane is a symbol of longevity in Chinese and Japanese art.
In
the final stanza, we seem to leave behind the panoramic perspective to examine
minutely the actual sculpture. Every detail-discoloration, crack or dent-on the
crafted surface is closely observed and simultaneously transformed into symbol.
You
can check out my YouTube videos on the same topic where I have explained
everything in Hindi in detail. Links are below-
Block-9
The Modernist Poets
The wasteland analysis and summary
More
related and helpful links in the description box of my YouTube channel.
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