WB Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the
foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment,
he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as
a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary
Revival.
Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland, and educated there and in London. He
spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age, when
he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the
first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His
earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical
poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical
and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he
remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical
theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Writing style
Yeats is considered one of the key twentieth-century English-language poets. He
was a Symbolist poet, using allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his
career. He chose words and assembled them so that, in addition to a particular
meaning, they suggest abstract thoughts that may seem more significant and
resonant. His use of symbols[94] is usually something physical that is both itself and a
suggestion of other, perhaps immaterial, timeless qualities.
Unlike the modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the
traditional forms. The impact of modernism on his work can be seen in the increasing
abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work.

While Yeats's early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore, his later work was
engaged with more contemporary issues, and his style underwent a dramatic
transformation. His work can be divided into three general periods. His other early
poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects. Critics who
admire his middle work might characterize it as supple and muscular in its rhythms
and sometimes harshly modernist, while others find these poems barren and weak in
imaginative power. Yeats's later work found new imaginative inspiration in the
mystical system he began to work out for himself under the influence of spiritualism.
In many ways, this poetry is a return to the vision of his earlier work
Among School Children
Intro
‘Among School Children’ is about a visit made by the ageing Yeats to a
convent school in Waterford, Ireland in February 1926. As a Senator, Yeats is
visiting the school as a public figure, but the poem is a record of his private
thoughts.
The central themes of “Among School Children” are best exemplified in
the central action: A sixty-year-old official is visiting with elementary
school children. The age-old poetic themes of innocence versus
experience, naivety versus wisdom, and youth versus age permeate every
stanza of the poem. Yeats, who in his youthful work frequently dealt with
incidents of passing and loss, virtually became obsessed with those
themes as he became older and faced his own mortality in more real, less
abstract terms.

‘Among School Children’ is at once public and private: its ‘action’ takes place in a public
setting, but this public backdrop prompts the private musings of the aged poet; but he
then makes his personal meditations public again, by choosing to publish the poem. In
the last analysis, it is at once direct and elliptical in its meaning – typical Yeats, we might
say. The symbols refuse to be pinned down too tightly. In order to dance, after all, one
must have some freedom.

ALTERNATIVE APPROACH
 
“Among School Children”
  by William Butler Yeats is among the most famous English poems of the 20th
century. It is an eight-stanza poem which reflects many themes. There are
several themes that are common throughout the poems of William Butler Yeats.
Many of poems by W.B. Yeats reflect an unrelenting obsession with the past,
and his fear of growing old or aging and a persistent fear of death, unrequited
life-long love for Maud Gonne, and numerous references to youth, education
and journey of life.
The theme of youth and old age is very prominent in “Among School
Children”. Yeats frequently compares and contrasts between these two. In
the very first stanza being clearly conscious of his old age he addresses himself
as a “sixty-year-old smiling public man”. Then in third stanza he visualizes
Moude Gonne in a child before him whose Gonne’s youthful purity h
hypnotizes him. But immediately, he compares her childhood with her present
age. In her growing age, she is now “hollow of cheek. He also reminisces a
moment of his own previous “pretty plumage” when he had jet-black hair as a
young man. But then snaps back to
the present. Through these quick shifts he reveals how much he is conscious of 
hisgrowing age. In stanza four; he portrayed the disappointed of mothers seeing
their child becoming aged. Lastly, he says though every human know aging is
part of life, still we all are self-mockery of our old age.

Besides this, there are also several major and minor themes in this poem.
Among them most common one is his unrequited love for Moude Gonne.
Most of his poems somehow have the presentation of Moude Gonne. Sometimes
he recalls her or sometimes glorifies her. Similarly, in this poem he firstly he
imagines her in children. Then reminisce a moment of their youth. He compares
her beauty with that of Helen. He also describes Gonne’s swan-like beauty, saying,
“Even the daughters of the swan can share something of every paddler’s
heritage.” Slipping deeper into his imagination, Yeats passionately portrays
Gonne, until “she stands before me as a living child.” Tragically, Yeats knows
that this perfection will eventually be corrupted, causing Yeats to have a “fit of
grief or rage”

Analysis of Among School Children

‘Among School Children’ is written in the Italian verse form called ottava rima,
rhymed abababcc. There are eight of these eight-line stanzas. Is the number eight
important for this poem? Perhaps not. But there is a certain symmetry in the ‘eight by
eight’ structure, with the total – 64 – not being too far off Yeats’s own age when he wrote
the poem (he was actually 60).

In summary, ‘Among School Children’ is about a visit made by the ageing Yeats to a
convent school in Waterford, Ireland in February 1926. As a Senator, Yeats is visiting the
school as a public figure, but the poem is a record of his private thoughts. In the second
stanza, his mind begins to wander, and Yeats dreams of his muse and love, Maud Gonne,
when she was a young woman with a body like Leda (who was raped by Zeus in the form
of a swan, as Yeats treated in his earlier poem ‘Leda and the Swan’). Although Yeats
and Gonne were never an item, she inspired him throughout his life, and he sees the two
of them as kindred spirits – like the yolk and white of an egg.

In the third stanza, Yeats is torn back to the present moment in the schoolroom, and
wonders whether Maud was like any of the young girls in the convent school, when she
was their age. Yeats’s reference to ‘daughters of the swan’ suggests not Leda, but the
woman her union with Zeus gave rise to: Helen of Troy, the beautiful Greek woman whose
abduction brought about the Trojan War. (Helen of Troy features elsewhere in Yeats’s
poetry, for instance in ‘Long-Legged Fly’, where she is described as one part woman,
three parts child.) The schoolgirl he looks upon now seems to be the old Maud
reincarnated as a young woman, ‘a living child’.

In the fourth stanza, he pictures Maud now, later in life, ageing as he himself is. It’s as if her
late beauty was fashioned by a Renaissance artist. He then reflects on his past with Maud,
and states that although he wasn’t quite the stuff of Greek myth, he, too, ‘had pretty
plumage once’ – a nod to the swanlike form Zeus assumed when he raped Leda. He then
recalls himself to the present and decides he must put a public face on while at the school,
and so banishes such memories and meditations.

The fifth stanza, however, sees Yeats immediately returning to such self-analysis. This
time, however, he considers it from the mother’s perspective: was it worth his mother
suffering the pain of childbirth so that he could live his sixty-odd years on this planet?
Yeats himself, in a note on ‘Among School Children’, said that he borrowed the ‘honey of
generation’ image from an essay titled ‘The Cave of the Nymphs’, about a mythical idea
that honey destroys women’s memories of their pre-natal lives.

The sixth stanza considers the same issue, this time from the perspective of three ancient
Greek philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. Plato was an idealist, Aristotle a
materialist (who punished his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great, with a birch-like
instrument known as the ‘taws’), and Pythagoras believed in ‘the music of the spheres’.
Each had his own approach to the meaning of life.

The seventh stanza then shifts back to mothers, and indeed, to nuns (we are in a convent
school, after all). Both mothers and nuns’ worship ‘images’: the mother, the image of her
child, and the nun, a religious icon or statue, such as that representing Jesus or the Virgin
Mary. But even nuns break hearts, just as mothers and other women do, for they are ‘self-
born mockers of man’s enterprise’, ‘self-born’ because women are born of mothers but
are also mothers themselves. They mock man’s glory and ambition, because they can give
life whereas men cannot, and end up growing old and pathetic, like a ‘scarecrow’, as Yeats
feels he has become.

In the eighth and final stanza, Yeats turns to the question of ‘labour’ – the word carrying a
double meaning here, since it refers back to the themes of childbirth and motherhood
touched upon earlier in the poem, but also suggests Adam’s toil after he and Eve were cast
out from the Garden of Eden, following their Fall. ‘Blossoming’ suggests motherhood –
bringing forth new life – while ‘dancing’ suggests a pleasant form of labour that isn’t about
burning the midnight oil in search of wisdom, or harming the body through physical toil,
but a creative act full of vitality that nourishes the soul. Yeats’s address to the chestnut
tree provides a clue as to how we should interpret this final stanza, and, by extension, the
overall meaning of ‘Among School Children’: does the essence of the tree lie in its leaves,
its blossom, or its trunk? Is anyone part of it more ‘treelike’ than the others? No: it is the
sum of its parts. We cannot ‘tell the dancer from the dance’, because we are defined by
what we do: when dancing, the dancer and the movement they create are one. If we cease
to perform our ‘dance’ – this statement of who we are, which creates the very vitality that
gives us meaning – we become what Yeats fears he has become, worn-out ‘scarecrows’
with no true ‘life’ as such.
THE SECOND COMING

Intro
"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, written in 1919, several
years after the end of World War I. It is named after the Christian "Second Coming,"
which is the Biblical prophecy that predicts Jesus's return to earth to reign after the
end of days.
Yeats's poem describes a very different kind of "Second Coming": an apocalypse led
by not Jesus Christ, but rather by a "rough beast" whose approach forms the poem's
mysterious conclusion. Reflecting a widespread mood of disenchantment and
alienation immediately after the first World War, the poem suggests that modernity
represents a kind of chaos, the collapse of civilization rather than its apex.

THEME
World War I in which 16 million people were killed in a horrifying display of the
power of modern technological warfare and of the continuing conflicts that wracked
the supposedly modern, civilized world. The poem voices a sense of shock, dismay,
and pessimism about the future that many felt after the war. Lines like "blood-
dimmed tide" and "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" both eloquently describe
the horrific chaos of war and violence.

"The Second Coming" is a deeply ominous poem, full of foreshadowing. Like

mythical Greek oracles of old, delivering prophecies in the form of fragmented
predictions of the future, it is full of grandiose, dramatic premonitions that do not
necessarily make the future much clearer: all it is sure of is that something is going to
happen, and the world will never be the same.

In this poem, Yeats uses Christianity as a stand-in for all order, ethics, and tradition.
He borrows this poem's title from the Book of Revelations, which describes Christ's
return to earth after the end times as a "second coming" (the first, of course, having
been Christ's return after his crucifixion).

SUMMARY
"The Second Coming" is narrated by a speaker who is observing the world around him with
horror. The poem begins with the phrase "Turning and turning in the widening gyre," a
sentence that evokes an occult symbol that perpetually fascinated William Butler Yeats:
interlocked circles. A gyre is a spiral or vortex, and Yeats believed that the universe was
comprised of interlocked circles, which together make up up individual lives that coalesce to
form the whole of existence.
Essentially, this first line is just a complex way of saying that something is happening in this
world. Something is churning and awakening; some new existence is rising out of the current
haze of life that we all live in, expanding it and enlarging the scope of what life is and
altering how the world works on a fundamental level.

The whole first section finds the speaker observing a world that is losing touch with order
and morality. Violence is destroying innocence, people have become detached from their
leaders, something fundamental is dissolving, and people who believe in goodness are being
silenced, while the loudest speakers are the villains and chaos-bringers.

The second section, beginning with the line "Surely some revelation is at hand," finds the
speaker sure that some major shift is happening around him. All this chaos cannot be an
accident, certainly. Something vast is coming, some distorted version of the Christian
apocalypse is descending upon the land; some ending is approaching.

The third section describes the speaker's vision for what this Second Coming, this new world
redefined by all the violence and chaos that occurred in the past, might look like. He thinks
about the "Spiritus Mundi," which is a Latin term meaning "World Spirit," and begins to
visualize images within this "World Spirit," including desert sphinxes and shadowy birds.

By the end of the poem, the speaker is sure that something even worse is coming. Some
nightmare—some "rough beast"—is rising, approaching the earth at a rapid pace. He doesn't
know what this creature is, but he can sense its approach—and it is the ominous core of "The
Second Coming," that mysterious tide of evil and mystery approaching the world in the form
of a modernity full of violence, war, and the loss of traditional meaning and values.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree

The Lake Isle of Innisfree is a part of collection of twenty-two poems named The Rose
by WB Yeats published in 1893. It was only his second lyrical collection, but contains
many of his famous mythological poems. At this point in his life, Yeats was steeped
deeply into the world of ancient Ireland, characterized in popular imagination as the
"isle of saints and scholars." He evoked his legendary home country and its
fantastical creatures with a poetic vocabulary at once lush and precise.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” expresses a set of desires familiar in the

modern world: to escape, to achieve peace and solitude, to be at one with
nature. Yeats says almost nothing in the poem about what he would like
to escape from, but his reader can easily imagine the stressful conditions
of modern, especially urban, life. Such desires have been common
themes in Romantic literature since the beginning of the nineteenth
century, and “Innisfree” is a good example of late nineteenth century
Romanticism.

THEME

The Peacefulness of Nature

It's clear that the speaker of the poem yearns for peace. Yeats creates tension by hinting that this
yearning has come about because the speaker is not currently in a place where he feels peace
physically or emotionally. The imagery Yeats provides about the nature of Innisfree is in direct
contrast to the hard "pavements grey" that the speaker is revealed to be standing on. The
imagery hints that it's only in nature that a true, deep peace can be achieved. It's telling that the
speaker wishes to be alone at Innisfree apart from the thrum of other humans and civilization.
This revelation signals that despite the innovations and excitement that may come from urban
living, there is something disconnecting and alienating about it as well.

Longing for Escape

While the poem is largely written in the present tense, it contains allusions to the past and
declarations of the future. The line "I will arise and go" declares a future intention that seems
immediate. However, the final stanza of the poem reveals that the speaker is quite far
from Innisfree and in an urban environment with "pavements grey." Much of the speaker's ode to
Innisfree is also based on his past recollections of it, which hints that perhaps it symbolized a
time or way of life that can no longer be returned to. On a personal level, that could mean the
loss of childhood peace and innocence. Because of the revelation that the speaker is currently in
an urban, perhaps more industrial, environment, it may also allude to a way of agricultural or
natural life that is fast disappearing. In this light Innisfree is symbolic as a place of escape, rather
than a real course of action, and its conjuring exists in recollection rather than current reality. It
seems significant that the speaker specifically mentions wanting to be alone at Innisfree. The
final stanza of the poem hints that he feels somewhat alienated and lonely amid the bustle of a
city.
Imagination and Reality
Although the poem is written as a declaration of intent and is about a real place, it becomes clear
to the reader that the speaker's portrait of Innisfree is highly imaginative. The
name Innisfree suggests an interior emotional landscape—Innis—that is free. It does not reflect
the environment of the speaker's current reality—or perhaps any exterior reality. The speaker
seems to have come to his decision to "arise and go" to Innisfree somewhat suddenly.
However, the specifics of what he imagines will be there reveals it may not be the first time he
has conjured up this daydream. The precise rendering of his imagination paints a vivid picture
and demonstrates that in many ways Innisfree is not an abstract idea or place for him.

Summary
Stanza 1
The speaker declares that he will get up and go at this moment to a place called Innisfree, where
he will build a small cabin made of "clay and wattles," or simple materials. He wishes to grow
nine rows of beans and keep a hive for honeybees. He wants to live alone, hearing the sounds of
the bees in the glade.

Stanza 2
At Innisfree, where the speaker plans to build his cabin and live, he expects to feel "some peace"
because of the close proximity to the natural world. He will hear crickets and watch the day pass
into night, with evening "full of the linnet's wings."

Stanza 3
The speaker repeats his declaration that he will "arise now and go" to Innisfree because he is
constantly reminded of the sound of "lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore." It is
revealed that the speaker currently lives in an urban environment with "pavements grey." Yet he
still hears and feels called to return to Innisfree for the peace it provides.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
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 Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

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 grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

The speaker expresses an intention to get up and go to a small island in Ireland

called Innisfree. On the island, the speaker wishes to build a modest cabin out of
clay and bundled twigs. The speaker hopes to plant nine rows of beans in a clearing,
which will buzz with the sound of honeybees tending to a nearby hive.

The speaker believes that this setting promises peace, which will emerge slowly as
the hazy mist of the morning falls to the earth, where crickets chirp. On the island,
light flickers beautifully in the middle of the night and glows with a purple hue at
midday, while little birds flutter about in the evenings.

The speaker reiterates an intent to get up and go to Innisfree, explaining that all day
and all night, the speaker imagines hearing the lake's waves breaking on the island's
shore. As the speaker stands on roads or other paved places, that imagined lake
sound resonates deep within the speaker's heart.