William Butler Yeats

Fault of an Image: Agency and Inevitability in “The Second Coming” The anxieties regarding global chaos and the possibility of individual culpability that inundated popular thought in the aftermath of World War I informs William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming.” At its core, the poem is an exploration of the equivocal boundaries between individual agency—and further, responsibility—and the inevitability of world events determined by an act of divine providence. Rather than embracing…

– especially him. His unconditional love of her “pilgrim soul” and “the sorrow of [her] changing face” never wavered as she grew older, but she never got a chance to experience what could have been true love (7-8). In the first stanza, Yeats utilized very peaceful terms like “full of sleep”, “nodding by the fire”, and “dream” to set a tone of calmness and tranquility (1-3). He also mentions eyes that had lost their light in reference to the fact that he believes that his love would…

of the time would write it. Her rewriting of the Deirdre story may have been for the people, but it was not without its political motives. At this point in time there was a need for the Revival of the Irish people and Lady Gregory along with W.B. Yeats wanted to unite the people of Ireland with the Cuchulain stories. The main focus is on the “Fate of the Sons of Usnach” or simply called the Deirdre story. The way that Lady Gregory writes the Deirdre story is by composing it so that it is written…

congratulating him on not taking sides.” The particular process of making the bow with his father embodies this difficulty. To add to Patmore’s assessment of poetry, Yeats states that “the following of art is little different from the following of religion in the intense preoccupation it demands.” Clearly Heaney was preoccupied, as was Yeats, with the role of the poet and the voice they used to express that role, and perhaps Heaney only became aware of this when he wrote Field Work. Therefore,…

In Adam’s Curse, Yeats captivatingly exposes Ireland’s migration away from true love to ‘new love’. Yeats enriches his poem with a story of his lost love with a ‘beautiful mild woman’, who has ‘grown weary-hearted’ of him as a result of this ‘new love’. He cleverly interconnects this narration with the reason behind Ireland’s shift away from true love; foreign influence, producing the malformed and distorted, ‘new love’. Communally, through this interconnection enriched with symbolism, imagery,…

Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations tells the story of the fictional Donegal village of Baile Beag during the First Ordnance Survey of Ireland – a mapping of the country and anglicizing the Irish names of the places. The major theme of the play is language, and more specifically how the loss of a language can also help erase people’s history, culture and identity. In the 1800s Ireland was still a predominantly Gaelic-speaking nation. In 1975, only 2.7% of Irish speakers possessed a native…

story. When tragedy or calamity strikes, it affects people in different ways. Past events, loyalties, and moral viewpoints define how one sees a situation. Concerning the Easter 1916 uprising, Yeats seems to change his views of the people involved and explores his feelings in the poem “Easter 1916.” Yeats, at the start of the piece, seems to have a fairly low view of the rebels. He respects the nobility and bravery of what the revolutionaries did, but isn’t sure whether to classify them as…

In the poem “When You Are Old,” William Butler Yeats is telling his past lover that once she gets to her old age, she will be regretting and dying alone. Yeats uses metaphorical imagery to buildup a scenario of unavoidable fade to age alone. Yeats tells her that she will be “old and grey and full of sleep” (line 1). He presents the quality of being old with two metaphors. The color “grey” is associated with the characteristics of being old and the color itself is closely related to the color…

The Land and the sea James Joyce one of Irelands greatest writers considered his characters as ways of the reader seeing the world from a different perspective. In The Proteus chapter in Ulysses and in Dubliners Joyce questions the land and the sea and represents Irish life in his work. The idea of the sea against the land as some sort of border can be seen through Joyce’s characters Evelyn in Dubliners and Stephen in Proteus.(Joyce, Ulysses) The paralysis of Irish life is contemplated in…

Poems can be read with vast meanings and Yeats experimented with various meanings in his writings. He incorporated many religious references within this poem, thus it can be read in a religious apocalyptic expression. This enables readers of all different cultures and religious backgrounds to make connections with the poem. At the end of Stanza 1, Yeats adeptly describes the story of Noah’s ark, but the animals are not in an orderly manner, they are chaotic and distressed. The dramatized words…