Yeats

Yeats explores the tension between the real world and the ideal world in many of his poems. The natural world, rich with the peaceful sounds of honey-bees and ‘linnet’s wings’, is compared to the greyness of city life. He contrasts the heroic idealism of the patriots who died for Ireland with the drab merchant class who ‘add the halfpence to the pence.’ Elsewhere his poetry is alive with the tension between the feverish mortal life of ‘fish, flesh and foul’ and the desire for immortality. In his poems he often contrasts the disillusioned older poet looking back on a younger more idealistic self. I will explore this theme of the ideal and the reality in reference to Yeats’s ‘September 1913’, ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’, ‘Byzantium’ and ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’.

In September 1913 Yeats is angry because the ideals of the patriots who had died for Irish freedom are betrayed by the reality of the modern Ireland he lives in. He contrasts the selfless ideals of O Leary, Tone and Emmet with the pecuniary attitude of the merchant classes. Yeats had tried unsuccessfully to raise money to house the Hugh Lane collection of paintings and was horrified by the treatment of workers in the lockout of 1913. These two events inspired the poem and explain why he despises the wealthy catholic middle class; ‘You have dried the marrow from the bone’. He portrays them as cowardly ‘prayer to shivering prayer’ as they prey on vulnerable workers. Yeats portrays this rich merchant as being vulgar and selfish who only value money and who ‘fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence’. This is in sharp contrast to the heroic ideals of the patriots who ‘weighed so lightly what they gave’. He is enraged when he sees the ideals of the past being destroyed by the reality of the new emerging wealthy middle class.
The tension in the poem is outlined in the contrast between the two worlds, the heroic past and the materialistic present. Yeats outlines the great sacrifice that was