The Value of W.B. Yeatsa Poetry
‘The value of poetry lies in its ability to illuminate the world within’
Do you agree?
The value of W.B. Yeats’ poetry lies within his ability to illuminate a world within –a transcendent salvation for beauty, longevity and order arising from a world ridden by anarchical change; A salvation that shapes and preserves his poignant and lyrical confrontations by enlightening the fraught arguments of the human heart. From his introspective lamentation of life’s futility in ‘Amongst School Children’ and lyrical speculation of the violence within ‘Leda and the Swan’, it is evident that the shapely stillness of his verse counters the struggles of our physical existence and spirituality. Yeats’ poetry thus speaks beyond the confinement of a certain context and confronts the timeless yet unresolvable tensions between love and loss, and beauty and destruction, whilst illuminating the path from the imperfection of reality to the aesthetic perfection of art.
In ‘Amongst School Children’ Yeats confronts and enlightens our understanding of the stages of youthful, maternal and religious love, which he found to be inextricably attached to loss due to his acute awareness of the certainties of time, age and death. The “Ledaean body, bent above a sinking fire” represents the diminishing youthfulness of Yeats’ first love Maud Gonne, with the cooling embers corresponding to the fading passions of youth. His former idealisation of their love has given way to a “youthful sympathy” where he masquerades as a “smiling public man” who can only find acceptance through their distant spiritual connection, symbolised by the harmony of “the yolk and white of the one shell” that parallels the miscibility of love and loss. Yet Yeats even challenges innate maternal love through rhetorically questioning whether his “sixty or more winters” is “a compensation for the pang of his birth”, allegorising the laborious process of childbirth to the struggles of life and our futile attempts to escape our
Do you agree?
The value of W.B. Yeats’ poetry lies within his ability to illuminate a world within –a transcendent salvation for beauty, longevity and order arising from a world ridden by anarchical change; A salvation that shapes and preserves his poignant and lyrical confrontations by enlightening the fraught arguments of the human heart. From his introspective lamentation of life’s futility in ‘Amongst School Children’ and lyrical speculation of the violence within ‘Leda and the Swan’, it is evident that the shapely stillness of his verse counters the struggles of our physical existence and spirituality. Yeats’ poetry thus speaks beyond the confinement of a certain context and confronts the timeless yet unresolvable tensions between love and loss, and beauty and destruction, whilst illuminating the path from the imperfection of reality to the aesthetic perfection of art.
In ‘Amongst School Children’ Yeats confronts and enlightens our understanding of the stages of youthful, maternal and religious love, which he found to be inextricably attached to loss due to his acute awareness of the certainties of time, age and death. The “Ledaean body, bent above a sinking fire” represents the diminishing youthfulness of Yeats’ first love Maud Gonne, with the cooling embers corresponding to the fading passions of youth. His former idealisation of their love has given way to a “youthful sympathy” where he masquerades as a “smiling public man” who can only find acceptance through their distant spiritual connection, symbolised by the harmony of “the yolk and white of the one shell” that parallels the miscibility of love and loss. Yet Yeats even challenges innate maternal love through rhetorically questioning whether his “sixty or more winters” is “a compensation for the pang of his birth”, allegorising the laborious process of childbirth to the struggles of life and our futile attempts to escape our