Comparing Mood and Atmosphere of The Pity of Love, Broken Dreams, and The Fisherman

Mood and Atmosphere of The Pity of Love, Broken Dreams, and The Fisherman

The Pity of Love is a short, relatively simple poem, yet it still manages to create a feeling of anxiousness, of desperate worry. Yeats achieves this in only eight lines of average length by extremely careful and precise use of language and structure. The poem begins with the line "A pity beyond all telling•, immediately setting the general tone and basic point of the piece, elevating his despair to its highest levels and plunging the poem into the depths of depression and failure; before it has barely begun, Yeats is already admitting defeat, after a fashion, claiming that this pity is so terrible he is unable to properly describe it.

The folk who are buying and selling,

The clouds on their journey above,

The cold wet winds ever blowing,

And the shadowy hazel grove

Where mouse-grey waters are flowing,

These pastoral images are all part of an ordinary rural life, something for which Yeats always strived. However, unlike his usual praising of these elements of life, this time he presents them in a distinctly downbeat way, emphasising the negative aspects, and becoming darker and darker in tone with every successive example - the wind is "cold• and "wet•; the clouds are assumed to be storm clouds from the juxtaposition of the description of the wind straight after the description of the clouds; the hazel grove is "shadowy• and the water is "mouse-grey•. These are all very washed-out, colourless, cold adjectives that refect the depressed nature of the narrator. The image of somewhat frantic movement conveyed by the use of the words "buying and selling•, "journey above•, "ever blowing• and "?owing• represent the inner ...

... middle of paper ...

...anza helps to contribute to the unplanned feeling, and the constantly shifting focus gives an almost ‘stream-of-consciousness' feel to the proceedings. As indicated by the title, this is a sombre poem, due to its subject matter, but it is not a bitter poem; in fact, in places, it is very romantic, particularly the third stanza:

The certainty that I shall see that lady

Leaning or standing or walking

In the first loveliness of womanhood,

And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,

Has set me muttering like a fool.

It is as if Yeats has finally accepted Gonne's rejection and is no longer tormented by it. He is much more at peace writing Broken Dreams than with his other Maud Gonne poems. Whilst he still finds his life understandably sad, he no longer expects her to change her mind and, accordingly, he does not write a depressingly bitter poem.