Samantha Clark Forster ENLT 2523 19 September 2011 Yeats and the Everlasting “Everything exists‚ everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet‚” writes the famed William Butler Yeats on one of his favorite subjects: eternity. Yeats’s poetry often deals with the conflict of the temporal and the eternal. The chronology of Yeats’s life allows for a very interesting exploration of this conflict—coming of age at the end of the nineteenth century‚ Yeats’s literary career
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William Butler Yeats/Irish history. Yeats’ parents‚ Susan Pollexfen and John Butler Yeats‚ offered Yeats kinship with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families who are mentioned in his work. Normally‚ Yeats would have been expected to identify with his Protestant tradition—which represented a powerful minority among Ireland’s predominantly Roman Catholic population—but he did not. Indeed‚ he was separated from both historical traditions available to him in Ireland—from the Roman Catholics‚ because
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An inherent tension between stability and change is revealed through recurring images in Yeats’ poetry. To what extent does your interpretation of Yeats’ The Second Coming and at least one other poem align with this view? William Butler Yeats’ poetry possesses strong imagery and themes of stability and change. Two of the poems‚ which especially highlight these elements‚ are The Second Coming and The Wild Swans At Coole. Within both of these poems the recurring imagery conjures creates strong
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What need you‚ being come to sense‚ But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer‚ until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save; Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone‚ It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Yet they were of a different kind‚ The names that stilled your childish play‚ They have gone about the world like wind‚ But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman’s rope was spun‚ And what‚ God help
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The poems‚ "The Wild Swans at Coole" and "The Great Scarf of Birds‚" unconsciously play off one another. Yeats and Updike paint similar pictures about similar topics. Although these poems consist of similar subjects‚ the authors’ diction and details are at completely different ends of the poetry spectrum. William Butler Yeats’ poem "The Wild Swans at Coole" tells of a man who‚ in the autumn‚ would visit this pool of water that was a resting place for a flock of swans. He visits them one
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Compare & Contrast: Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and Yeats’ “Cloths of Heaven” As two of the greatest classical poets in the history of literature‚ William Butler Yeats and Edgar Allen Poe constantly vie for my favored attentions. Their poems‚ such as “Annabel Lee” and “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” (now more commonly known as “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”)‚ have set the tone for some of the greatest romantic poetry of our time. Both were made into songs which I have had the utmost privilege
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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
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with the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens‚ William Butler Yeats stands among the few writers whose work has been engraved permanently onto the walls of English literature. It is through Yeats’ exploration of themes such as the passing of time‚ fragility of human life and the inevitability of death teemed with the exploration of the idea of destruction and its relevance in all societies have enraptured readers of the modern century. Yeats’ writings have immortalised him‚ so he may never be forgotten
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inevitability of death.” Sailing to Byzantium confronts the problems posed by advancing age. Yeats found the idea of bodily decay and decrepitude intolerable and in this poem‚ he outlines a means to escape‚ to travel in imagination to an ideal place‚ in which he will be exempt from decay or death‚ a civilization in which he can spend his eternity as a work of art. It is a definitive statement about the agony of old age. Yeats is out of place in a world teeming with youth and vitality where “the young” are “in
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interesting in themselves and help to make sense of the period of cultural crisis that defined abstraction‚ fragmentation‚ pastiche‚ tricks of perspective and surrealism in modern literature and painting: T.S. Eliot The Waste Land (Part 1)‚ W. B. Yeats ‘The Second Coming’‚ Gertrude Stein Picasso (selections) and paintings by Picasso and Dalí. Discussion includes the teaching advantages of the new iPad The Waste Land application and a range of easier novels. Modernism (about 1880 – 1939) is a cultural
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