(An Analysis of the Themes of Stasis vs. Changing in Yeats’ Work)

The world we live in works intricately. It isn’t something that just anyone can understand. In fact, no one really knows the way the world in which we live operates. But the author W.B. Yeats was on to something that cleared things up a bit. He believed that the world was made up of relationship between stasis and changing. In many of his works, he made statements about these relationships. However, what he said isn’t necessarily clear to average reader. Is their interaction good? Which one acts on the other? These are all questions that Yeats will subliminally answer in his poetry. There is evidence of the opposition in Yeats’ poems Old, Lake, Wild, Second, and Sailing.

Initially, there is evidence of this opposition in the poem Old. In this poem, Yeats addresses a women he loved in the past, and how she should lament the loss of a true love. Sure, while she was young and beautiful, she had many suitors who pretended to like her. But she only had one who truly loved her, as this quote shows. “How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true… Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled (Lines 5-10)” She was used to being young and beautiful, and it was what she knew. But eventually, she changed, and the suitors stopped coming. But it was all too late.

Also, there is evidence of this opposition in the poem Lake. In this text, the narrator yearns to live in the country, much like Ralph Waldo Emerson did at Walden Pond. This quote will show his predicament. “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree… While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core. (Lines 1, 11-12)” He is stuck in the city; The city, where things are constantly changing. He wants to ge...

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...arly, these poems all have a statement to make about the opposition of stasis and change. Old says that false love is always changing, but true love is constant. Lake states that nature is much more desirable than city life, become it is unchanging, whereas people change things constantly. Wild gives us the realization that things that have always been one way may at any time become different. In Second, we see how people change the world too fast, and sorrow ensues. Finally, the great poem Sailing to Byzantium makes clear the faults of humanity in our pursuit for the physical, ever-changing aspects of life, when what really matters are the ever-constant aspects of the metaphysical world. From this week of reading Yeats, and some deep thought into the matter, I have come to this very simple conclusion about the world we live in. Nature doesn’t change, until it does.