Throughout life, it is very apparent that things don’t always stay the same. It is also true to say that certain places, people, or things never change. The matter of change and stability can not only alter your life, but emotions too. Some people hate the same things happening over and over again and thrive for change. On the other hand, instability only causes problems for some people. This concept is also discussed greatly in the world of poetry, especially in that of Yeats. Critic Richard Ellmann wrote that Yeat’s poetry is in fact about the opposition between “the world of change” and the world of “changelessness”. This analysis is very relevant. In Yeats’ 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. First of all, throughout the poem “When you are Old” by William Yeats, you can begin to analyze the change and changelessness that he is experiencing in his life. This particular poem is written directly to a woman that he once loved, but she didn’t quite return as great of feelings. Yeats states that this writing is for to specifically read when she is old and gray. He explains that most men only loved her falsely for her beauty, but he loved her soul, “But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face.” (Lines 7-8) This means that he didn’t only care about her appearance and continued to love her no matter how time changed her. He also makes the point that because she didn’t welcome love when she had the chance, the opportunity to have a lover has now fled and she’ll stay alone into her older years. This particular poem focus... ... middle of paper ... ... man in the poem though specifically says, “Once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing,” (Lines 25-26) meaning that he doesn’t want to come back as something alive because they always die. Instead, he wants to come back as a piece of art or a “monument of un-changing intellect”. 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.
Keats’ poetry explores many issues and themes, accompanied by language and technique that clearly demonstrates the romantic era. His poems ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Bright Star’ examine themes such as mortality and idealism of love. Mortality were common themes that were presented in these poems as Keats’ has used his imagination in order to touch each of the five senses. He also explores the idea that the nightingale’s song allows Keats to travel in a world of beauty. Keats draws from mythology and christianity to further develop these ideas. Keats’ wrote ‘Ode To A Nightingale’ as an immortal bird’s song that enabled him to escape reality and live only to admire the beauty of nature around him. ‘Bright Star’ also discusses the immortal as Keats shows a sense of yearning to be like a star in it’s steadfast abilities. The visual representation reveal these ideas as each image reflects Keats’ obsession with nature and how through this mindset he was able
When You are Old, by William Butler Yeats, represents and elderly woman reminiscing of her younger days. A past lover whispers to her as she looks through a photo album. Basically, Yeats is showing that as the woman gets older, she is alone, but she does not have to be lonely. She will always have her memories for companionship.
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 ...
"Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too." So often, people look back upon their youth and wish that they still had it before them. Our natural tendency is to fear old age, to see it as the precursor to death, rather than a time of life, desirable in its own right. However, in John Keats' poem, To Autumn, he urges us not to take this view, but to see old age as a beautiful and enviable state of life, rather than something to be feared.
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
... Therefore, instead of losing mental stability because of old memories, one should try to embrace sanity and perpetuate it in life. Moreover, the poem emulates society because people fantasize about looking a certain way and feeling a certain way; however, they are meddling with their natural beauty and sometimes end up looking worse than before. For instance, old men and women inject their faces to resemble those in their youth, but they worsen their mental and physical state by executing such actions. To conclude, one should embrace her appearance because aging is inevitable.
This opposition shows Keats highlighting the delicate correspondence between happiness, death and melancholy having humanistic traits. In order to experience true sorrow, one must feel true joy to see the beauty of melancholy. However, Keats’s poem is not all dark imagery, for interwoven into this poem is an emerging possibility of resurrection and the chance at a new life. The speaker in this poem starts by strongly advising against the actions and as the poem continues urges a person to take different actions.
As the poem can be interpreted in numerous ways, and therefore, its message has a flexibility that enables its readers to mould it’s meaning to befit them. Thus, allowing its messages to be applicable to anyone, regardless of demographic. For example, the poem can also be interpreted by Christians as man’s decaying interest of Christian ideologies and the supposed products of this decay. A view held by plenty of older Christians and a important view for Christian youth to acquire in order to cement their beliefs. Though the message conveyed by Yeats that can be applicable to all contemporary youth, is that depravity and tension arouses conflict. And when we look forward, we feel our anxiety stir at the inevitable - at the international conflict embedded in humanities future. Why will this conflict occur? Because if relations between ‘super-powers’ are withered now, how would it cope though overpopulation, the depletion of resources and other problems ever nation has to overcome? How can we be sure that these super-powers won’t value land, and resources such as oil over their populations in order to maintain their economic and political power? We don’t. This is why a third world war is indeed probable, and why this poem’s core message is still relevant to all
Yeats opens his poem with a doom-like statement. He states "Turning and turning in the widening gyre." This enhances the cyclic image that Yeats is trying to portray. Here, Y...
It is uncertain what mysteries the Second Coming will entail. Through the use of symbolism and allusion, Yeats has described how one world meets its horrid demise. However, the birth of the new world's fate will also bring dark repression and havoc. In Yeats' eyes, history well repeats itself, which is evident of the looping spires of the gyre. In addition, the "ceremony of innocence is drowned," indicates that faith, like the act of communion, no longer exists. Although life is full of hopes and dreams for a better world, Yeats makes us speculate if that could ever be possible. It is evident that Yeats' pessimistic view on the Second Coming shows that he is fearful of change as well as the uncertainties of the future. However, one must go on believing and living one's dreams, or one too, will see life as Yeats so boldly foretells.
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...
Author of poetry, William Butler Yeats, wrote during the twentieth century, which was a time of change. It was marked by world wars, revolutions, technological innovations, and also a mass media explosion. Throughout Yeat's poems, he indirectly sends a message to his readers through the symbolism of certain objects. In the poems The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The wild Swans at Cole, and Sailing to Byzantium, all by William Yeats expresses the emotional impact of his word choices and symbolic images. To begin, the poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, uses the lake Innisfree to send a symbolic message.
The first half of the poem begins with the poet expressing his heightening disapproval of Maud Gonne's politics. He questions whether he should "blame her that she filled my days with misery." A. Norman Jeffares writes in W. B. Yeats that "the second line's 'of late' refers to Maud Gonne's withdrawal," but the poem seems to blame her inactivity on the "ignorant men" for not having "courage equal to desire," rather than her marital problems. These "ig...
To begin, Yeats uses the universal symbol of the night sky to symbolize unimportance and anonymity in his poem When You Are Old. This poem is about Yeats personal life. The whole point of this three stanza short poem is to make the girl he loved when he was young remember him when she grew older. Starting in line 1 and skipping to line 2, he says, “When you are old. . . And nodding by the fire, take down this book.” He put this poem in a book for her and her alone, as a profession of his love for her that cannot die. The symbol itself, however, is not a personal one but more a universal relator. In the last line of the poem, referring to her view of him and all of the other young men in her life, he says he “hid his face amid a crowd o...
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.