William Butler Yeats

"Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery . . ." (ll.1-2)
"No Second Troy" (Dec. 1908; 1910)

Points of Reflection

1. what tone dominates each of these poem? Are they celebratory or mournful?

2. does Yeats accomplish in "The Stolen Child" the "alluring monotony" of which he speaks in the following excerpt from "The Symbolism of Poetry"? As Yeats has it, the function of rhythm is “to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols” (159).

2. does the following idea articulated by Yeats seem to apply directly to any of the poems we read for today? “Literature differs from explanatory and scientific writing in being wrought about a mood, or a community of moods . . . and if it uses argument, theory, erudition, observation, and seems to grow hot in assertion or denial, it does so merely to make us partakers at the banquet of the moods. It seems to me that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All, the gods of ancient days . . . the angels of more modern days . . .” (Ideas of Good and Evil195).

3. in A General Introduction to My Work, Yeats claims “I planned to write short lyrics or poetic drama where every speech would be short and concentrated, knit by dramatic tension . . . I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech . . . I discovered some twenty years ago that I must seek . . . a powerful and passionate syntax . . .” (521-22). Does Yeats follow his own Wordsworthian edict and employ "passionate" and "normal" speech in his poems?

4. does this passage from From Good and Evil echo or counter Keats' earlier ideas about the art of poetry? "Everything that can be seen, touched, measured, explained, understood, argued over, is to the imaginative artist nothing more than a means, for he belongs to the invisible life, and delivers its ever new and ever ancient revelation. We hear much of his need for the restraints of reason, but the only restraint he can obey is the mysterious instinct that has made him an artist, and that teaches him to discover immortal moods in mortal desires, an undecaying hope in our trivial ambitions, a divine love in sexual passion” (195).

"Helen of Troy" (1863)
Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu