On the surface, William Butler Yeats’s poem No Second Troy, tells the narrative of a man questioning his unrequited loves morality and ideology. However, further reading of the poem gives the reader insight into Yeats’s own feelings towards Irish radical, Maud Gonne, a woman to whom he proposed on numerous occasions unsuccessfully. Gonne had always been more radical than Yeats within her efforts to secure Ireland’s independence from Britain in the first decades of the 20th century, but Yeats persisted in receiving her love, dedicating many of his poems to her, thus showing his obsession to the radical actress. The poem can be split into four rhetorical questions; first the speaker asks “why” he should blame her, for his own unhappiness; next he questions “what” else she could have done with her “noble” mind; following this, the speaker, seemingly speaking to himself, accepts that she is who she is and that cannot be changed, lastly the speaker questions whether there is anything else that could have been an outlet for her “fiery” temperament.
Initially, the poem can be viewed as a sonnet, however, true sonnets contain fourteen lines, in contrast to No Second Troy’s twelve, thus making it a douzaine. Like a sonnet, the rhyme scheme can divide the poem into three quatrains, with the lack of last rhyming couplet accounting for the lack of the last two lines. This coupled with a loose iambic pentameter gives the poem a controversial tone throughout, as it does not follow conventional ‘Love’ poem tradition. This
Within No Second Troy, the use of rhetorical questions gives the effect of a soliloquy or a monologue, of a man talking to himself in an informal way, shown by the use of enjambment. The questions also act as a tool to present confusion within the speaker.
“Why should I blame her that she filled my
Soyster uses one when he asks, “Why have I clung to this ritual, knowing it’s dangerous and futile”(Soyster 2). This sentence marks the climax of the essay. The destination the author is taking the reader to all along. Using an interrogative sentence makes the reader stop and reason about how they would answer said question themselves. It is a very effective writing strategy for Soyster to get the reader to slow down and think for a minute about his idea.
The second stanza is filled with three heroes from the Easter Rising, yet W.B. Yeats begins to depict them as unlikable people. He describes the heroine of the poem “in ignorant good-will”, arguing so much “her voice grew shrill”. After he highlights all the flaws of the heroine, he acquires a more respectful tone, stating, “What voice more sweet than hers.” Yeats uses her voice as a symbol of her life— rich, easy, and privileged until her involvement in the rebellion. The once sweet voice turns shrill, suggesting that she risked her prosperous life for a life of sacrifice and rebellion for Ireland.
After centuries of serving as background noise to her husband Ulysses’ odes of sea storms, sirens, and celebrity, the mythological Penelope finally steps into the light in Miriam Waddington’s poem “Ulysses Embroidered.” Functioning as a revisionary text to both the Alfred, Lord Tennyson work “Ulysses” and the tradition of The Odyssey itself, “Ulysses Embroidered” quickly strikes its readers as a fiercely feminist re-envisioning of Penelope and her tale. Waddington’s work allows for an age-old legend to be told in a new way with a bold, feminine speaker, but to what end do her changes remark on Tennyson’s original work? By engaging in two separate modes of revision by both reading against the grain and “constantly [engaging] in dialogue” to work in tandem with the original poem, Waddington
The tales were rediscovered around 1880 inspiring the Irish literary revival in romantic fiction by writers such as Lady Augusta Gregory and the poetry and dramatic works of W.B. Yeats. These works wer...
Bertilak "reads" the ominous and the disruptive in Layamon's depiction of the origins of Britain. By locating the story of Gawain's flirtation with Lady Bertilak within the context of Layamon's chronicle of treason in Troy as well as at Camelot, the Gawain-poet complicates any reading of Camelot and Hautdesert as opposed places with opposed valuations. Treason is already and always present at Camelot, named with obscure referent in the first stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight--and this very obscurity points to the difficulty of reaching any conclusions surrounding gender or sexuality in the poem. The use of history shows that femininity, masculinity, normative sexuality and transgression are all difficult, perhaps impossible, to define. Gawain, of course, does not read Brut, and is therefore left floundering in search of a finality which is unobtainable within the world of this poem.
In “The Fatal Sisters” Thomas Gray has created a monologue pregnant with references to history, geography, and mythology. These reappearing references and allusions enrich the text, as they allow a closer look at the political situation surrounding eleventh century Britain. The poems’ sixteen stanzas exhibit an ABAB rhyme scheme, which provides for systematic organization and positive aesthetic effects. Closer examination of the setting, tone, and imagery of the poem permits insight into the text’s content and artistic genius.
At first glance Edna St. Vincent Millay's first recognized poem, Renascence, seems to be easy to understand and follow. However, as this sing-songy poem is dissected, the reader embarks upon a world full of emotion, religion, confusion, pain and sin. This poem is split up into six sections or stanzas which separate the action of the poem into easy to understand parts. I have chosen to discuss the first section of the poem for my close reading.
William Yeats is deliberated to be among the best bards in the 20th era. He was an Anglo-Irish protestant, the group that had control over the every life aspect of Ireland for almost the whole of the seventeenth era. Associates of this group deliberated themselves to be the English menfolk but sired in Ireland. However, Yeats was a loyal affirmer of his Irish ethnicity, and in all his deeds, he had to respect it. Even after living in America for almost fourteen years, he still had a home back in Ireland, and most of his poems maintained an Irish culture, legends and heroes. Therefore, Yeats gained a significant praise for writing some of the most exemplary poetry in modern history
Though written only two years after the first version of "The Shadowy Waters", W.B. Yeats' poem "Adam's Curse" can be seen as an example of a dramatic transformation of Yeats' poetic works: a movement away from the rich mythology of Ireland's Celtic past and towards a more accessible poesy focused on the external world. Despite this turn in focus towards the world around him, Yeats retains his interest in symbolism, and one aspect of his change in style is internalization of the symbolic scheme that underlies his poetry. Whereas more mythological works like "The Shadowy Waters" betray a spiritual syncretism not unlike that of the Golden Dawn, "Adam's Curse" and its more realistic fellows offer a view of the world in which symbolic systems are submerged, creating an undercurrent of meaning which lends depth to the outward circumstances, but which is itself not immediately accessible to the lay or academic reader. In a metaphorical sense, then, Yeats seems in these later poems to achieve a doubling of audience, an equivocation which addresses the initiate and the lay reader simultaneously.
Throughout many of his poems, W.B Yeats portrayed important aspects of Ireland’s history especially around the 1900’s when Ireland was fighting for independence. During this time, Ireland was going through an agonizing time of struggle. The Employers’ Federation decided to lock out their workers in order to break their resistance. By the end of September, 25,000 workers were said to have been affected. Although the employers’ actions were widely condemned, they refused to consider negotiation or compromise with the Union. His readers are able to see how Yeats reflects the political, cultural, and societal atmosphere in Ireland during the early 1900’s. The poems September 1913 and Easter 1916 both reflect the political, cultural, and societal atmospheres that were found in Ireland around the 1900’s.
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...
The fourteen line sonnet is constructed by three quatrains and one couplet. With the organization of the poem, Shakespeare accomplishes to work out a different idea in each of the three quatrains as he writes the sonnet to lend itself naturally. Each of the quatrain contains a pair of images that create one universal idea in the quatrain. The poem is written in a iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Giving the poem a smooth rhyming transition from stanza to
Films have always been used to bring out various cultural artifacts and traditions. Through film, it would be easier for one to point out the culture in which one or the main character belongs to. The Iliad and Troy remains to be amongst the most renowned literal and film pieces that have been read, viewed and appreciated throughout history. Just as is the film Troy, which is based on the epic, The Iliad, Gladiator is a 2000 British–American epic historical drama film directed by Ridley Scott. The Gladiator features the character of Crowe, a fictional character, who is very loyal to Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius. Crowe is betrayed when Commodus, a very ambitious son to the then the emperor Marcus Aurelius takes over power after killing his father.
Yeats and Eliot are two chief modernist poet of the English Language. Both were Nobel Laureates. Both were critics of Literature and Culture expressing similar disquietude with Western civilization. Both, prompted by the Russian revolution perhaps, or the violence and horror of the First World War, pictured a Europe that was ailing, that was literally falling apart, devoid of the ontological sense of rational purpose that fuelled post-Enlightenment Europe and America(1). All these similar experience makes their poetry more valuable to compare and to contrast since their thoughts were similar yet one called himself Classicist(Eliot) who wrote objectively and the other considered himself "the last Romantic" because of his subjective writing and his interest in mysticism and the spiritual. For better understanding of these two poets it is necessary to mention some facts and backgrounds on them which influenced them to incorporate similar (to some extent) historical motif in their poetry.
In the 1916 poem “No Second Troy,” William Butler Yeats addresses the topics of love and heartbreak through his allusions. The love spoken about is that of Maude Gonne, the Irish women whom Yeats, the speaker, was madly in love with all throughout his life. This poem was written after Yeats had proposed to Gonne multiple times (at least 4) and was continuously turned down by her (Dwyer). The poem has a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEF and at first look it seems as if it is a sonnet but there are only twelve lines to the poem. “No Second Troy” is a lot like a Shakespearean sonnet in the way it is structured. It looks as though Yeats just believed that he didn’t need two last lines to make his point in the poem, therefore