Life can often serve trials of character as food for thought.Instances such as the death of a loved one, unrequited love, or broken dreams can offer a person thoughts not available in other circumstances. When William Butler Yeats finds out his close friend, Lady Gregory, is suffering from a life-endangering illness, he comes to a startling conclusion. In A Friend’s Illness, Yeats concisely uses a simile and an allusion towards Job to establish that having a dear friend sick can be a devastating event. Then in the same poem, Yeats uses another allusion to Job and reflective diction conveying a wondrous tone to conclude that there is slight narcissism in being in a deep state of woe while a dear friend is sick.
In the poem, Yeats compares the world to a piece of coal to reveal the severity of having a friend sick, or possibly dead, will affect the speaker. When the speaker talks about how dismayed he is as, “though the flame had burned the whole world, as it were a coal”. The image of a coal being set aflame brings to mind the destruction. After a while, the coal would become nothing but ash. Apply this to, “the whole world” and while it doesn’t actually mean setting the literal world on fire, it does indicate the destruction of the speaker’s realm where the sick person might play a heavy role. This gives the event an apocalyptic
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This given is that he is going through anguish of monolithic proportions, and not only that but that his torment is comparable to Job’s suffering. Once he compares himself to the Biblical figure, it can be assumed that he also asks Job’s question of, “Why me?” With this sort of thinking, the speaker sounds to say less of why should his sick friend go through of being ill and more of why is he going through the pain of caring for a friend who is sick and most likely to die. While this self-centered reasoning is not part Yeat’s message, it does lead to his
The narrator is forbidden from work and confined to rest and leisure in the text because she is supposedly stricken with, "…temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency," that is diagnosed by both her husband and her brother, who is also a doctor (1).
"The blood-dimmed tied is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned". As many currently see our society today, Yeats was in fear of what the future had in store, and felt it necessary to warn society of their abominable behavior. All of the good in the society has been taken over and overwhelmed by the horrible actions. No longer do ceremonies, or acts of kindness, take place, which Yeats believes is a direct effect of the loss of youth and innocence. "That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle". This quote from "The Second Coming" informs the society that if they do not begin to correct their transgressions against one another as a whole they will awake the anti-Christ. The anti-Christ will come to claim his Jesus and correct the predicament that they have gotten themselves in to.
Without any relatable hardships, people could only express sympathy or compassion, in that they would never be able to truly relate to other people’s hardships. People are limited to empathizing with only the similar hardships that they themselves have endured when they take the risk of pursuing self-interest. This further establishes the importance of the unique relationship between personal desires and empathy in one’s life. One is only able to gain the ability to empathize after failing in a pursuit of their own. Through the poem “Empathy”, Stephen Dunn emphasizes the importance of having one’s own stockpile of unpleasant memories from various pursuits gone wrong when it comes to having a sense of truly understanding the plight of
The thought of the narrator 's life of staying home all day to be taken care of by her husband and his sister, as well as having the husband go out and tarnish her reputation to her family and friends is such a dreadful thought. Apart from her husband John 's treatment is to keep her away from her family for a bit till she is better, but in order to do that he must disclose her well being with them. It is preposterous that her
Time is endlessly flowing by and its unwanted yet pending arrival of death is noted in the two poems “When I Have Fears,” by John Keats and “Mezzo Cammin,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Keats speaks with no energy; only an elegiac tone of euphoric sounds wondering if his life ends early with his never attained fame. He mentions never finding a “fair creature” (9) of his own, only experiencing unrequited love and feeling a deep loss of youth’s passion. Though melancholy, “Mezzo Cammin,” takes a more conversational tone as Longfellow faces what is commonly known as a midlife crisis. The two poems progressions contrast as Keats blames his sorrow for his lack of expression while Longfellow looks at life’s failures as passions never pursued. In spite of this contrast, both finish with similar references to death. The comparable rhyme and rhythm of both poems shows how both men safely followed a practiced path, never straying for any spontaneous chances. The ending tones evoking death ultimately reveal their indications towards it quickly advancing before accomplish...
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
middle of paper ... ... ory is not a nightmare from which Yeats is trying to awake; it is the very world in which he lives. When he says that if Gonne had understood him he would have ?been content to live,? it is another way of saying that (since she can never understand him) he is not content to live. As a poet, he has undergone a kind of death, rendering him a lifeless observer of the present while becoming an active participant in the past which his poetry explores.
All in all, Yeat’s poems: “When you are Old”, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”, “The Wild Swans at Coole”, “The Second Coming”, and “Sailing to Byzantium” all show the struggle and opposition between change and stability in the world. Yeats uses imagery, language, and ideas to represent change and changelessness just like the critic, Richard Ellmann, said. Yeats’ philosophy on the conflict of opposites by using gyres shows us how different forces struggle against one another, just like the development of a personality or the rise and fall of a new civilization.
His first poems about romance mentioned grey hair and exhaustion even if he wrote them while still young, and they still portray his consciousness about old age (Hoffman 29). In his 60s, Yeats began to get sickly. Regardless of his deteriorated health, he spent the last fifteen years of his life as a lively man who had an extraordinary appetite for life. He still wrote plays about spiritualism. One time after a recovery from a severe sickness, he created a sequence of dynamic poetries that recounted about an old poor fictitious female called Silly Jane as an expression of happiness. The passion for poetry kept Yeats active in his career and was determined to ensure that sickness did not hinder his
Throughout Keats’s work, there are clear connections between the effect of the senses on emotion. Keats tends to apply synesthetic to his analogies with the interactions with man and the world to create different views and understandings. By doing this, Keats can arouse different emotions to the work by which he intends for the reader to determine on their own, based on how they perceive it. This is most notable in Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale, for example, “Tasting of Flora, and Country Green” (827). Keats accentuates emotion also through his relationship with poetry, and death.
At a glance, the poem seems simplistic – a detailed observance of nature followed by an invitation to wash a “dear friend’s” hair. Yet this short poem highlights Bishop’s best poetic qualities, including her deliberate choice in diction, and her emotional restraint. Bishop progresses along with the reader to unfold the feelings of both sadness and joy involved in loving a person that will eventually age and pass away. The poem focuses on the intersection of love and death, an intersection that goes beyond gender and sexuality to make a far-reaching statement about the nature of being
At a glance, the poem seems simplistic – a detailed observance of nature followed by an invitation to wash a “dear friend’s” hair. Yet this short poem highlights Bishop’s best poetic qualities, including her deliberate choice in diction, and her emotional restraint. Bishop progresses along with the reader to unfold the feelings of both sadness and joy involved in loving a person that will eventually age and pass away. The poem focuses on the intersection of love and death, an intersection that goes beyond gender and sexuality to make a far-reaching statement about the nature of being
While she is buying flowers for her party, Mrs. Dalloway has an existential crisis regarding the meaning of life and the inevitability of death. She reflects on the atmosphere of the London streets and her old suitor Peter Walsh as she reads some lines from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Mrs. Dalloway’s existential crisis demonstrates situational irony since the concept of life and death is quite deep and complex, yet she seems to live a shallow life consisting of throwing parties and picking which flowers to buy. Although she is contemplating her own mortality, Woolf’s word choice, such as “consoling,” suggests that death is positive and liberating, applying a light tone to a dark situation, adding to the irony. Mrs. Dalloway describes the trees,
...t in it. He seeks to discover the thoughts that one must have as they prepare to die in combat. The airman seems to go through a series of thoughts during the poem as he accepts his fate, touches on his numbness to human life, reflects on his home and his fellow people, cites his reasons for even being in the war, and then claiming his dissatisfaction with his entire life, but not his death. Although Yeats does not tell about the airman's life, the reader is likely to assume that it was the war that caused the airman to think in this way. This shows the profound and dramatic effects that war has on the minds of its prisoners.
This refrain enforces his disgust at the type of money hungry people that the Irish have become. In the third and fourth stanza, however, Yeats completely changes the tone of his poetry. He praises the romantics of Irish history, such as Rob...