WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
13 June 1865 - 28 January 1939
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the
foremost figures of 20th-century
literature
LIFE
• William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, County Dublin
• His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen (1841-1900)
was the daughter of a wealthy family from County Sligo
• His father, John Butler Yeats (1839-1922) who was sympathetic to the Nationalists and Home Rulers.
• When they married he was studying to become a lawyer, but soon gave that up to follow his dreams of becoming an artist, of which he became a well known portrait painter. In 1907 he moved to New York City where he died in 1922
Yeats was born and educated in Dublin but spent his childhood in County Sligo. He studied poetry in his youth and from an early
age was fascinated by both Irish legends and the occult. Those topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly
until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889 and those slow-paced and lyrical poems
display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Pre-Raphaelite poets. From 1900, Yeats' poetry grew more
physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical
and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life.
He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and together
with Lady Gregory and Edward
Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre and served as its chief playwright
during its early years.
In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for
what the Nobel
Committee described as "his always inspired
poetry, which in a highly artistic form
gives expression to the spirit of a whole
nation".
Yeats as depicted on the Irish £20 banknote, issued 1976–1993.
• Yeats is generally considered one of the twentieth century's key English language poets.
• He was a Symbolist poet, in that he used allusive
imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career.
• Yeats chose words and assembled them so that, in addition to a particular meaning, they suggest other abstract thoughts that may seem more significant and resonant.
• His use of symbols is usually something physical that is both itself and a suggestion of other, perhaps
immaterial, timeless qualities.
Yeats's
gravestone in
Drumcliffe,
County Sligo
• POEM
• 1886 – Mosada
• 1889 – The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems
• 1891 – John Sherman and Dhoya
• 1892 – The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics
• 1894 – The Land of Heart's Desire
• 1895 – Poems
• 1897 – The Secret Rose
• 1899 – The Wind Among the Reeds
• 1900 – The Shadowy Waters
• 1902 – Cathleen in Houlihan
• 1903 – In the Seven Woods
• 1910 – The Green Helmet and Other Poems
• 1912 – The Cutting of an Agate
• 1913 – Poems Written in Discouragement
• 1914 – Responsibilities
• 1917 – The Wild Swans at Coole
• 1921 – Michael Robartes and the Dancer
• 1921 – Four Plays for Dancers
• 1924 – The Cat and the Moon
• 1927 – October Blast
• 1928 – The Tower
• 1929 – The Winding Stair
• 1933 – The Winding Stair and Other Poems
• 1934 – Collected Plays
• 1935 – A Full Moon in March
• 1938 – New Poems
• PROSE
• 1888 – Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry
• 1891 – Representative Irish Tales
• 1892 – Irish Faerie Tales
• 1893 – The Celtic Twilight (Kelt Şafağı)
• 1907 – Discoveries
• 1903 – Ideas of Good and Evil
• 1916 – Reveries Over Childhood and Youth
• 1918 – Per Amica Silentia Lunae
• 1921 – Four Years
• 1925 – A Vision
• 1926 – Estrangement
• 1926 – Autobiographies
Easter, 1916
Easter, 1916 is a poem by W. B.
Yeats describing the poet's torn emotions regarding the events of
the Easter Rising staged Easter Rising in Ireland against British rule on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916.
The uprising was unsuccessful, and most of the Irish Irish
republican leaders
republican leaders involved were executed for treason.
The poem was written between May and September 1916
EASTER 1916
I HAVE met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse - MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
the revolutionary leaders
I HAVE met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses. Dublin had mostly eighteenth-century architecture
I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said waited Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe joke
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club, humorous
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn: the fool’s multicoloured uniform
All changed, changed utterly: completely
A terrible beauty is born.
*Yeats begins the poem describing the casual friendship he enjoyed with the people he will go on to eulogize.
*The poem begins by paying tribute to the Irish people for leaving behind their
previously mundane, trivial lives to dedicate themselves to the fight for independence.
In lines which become a refrain, Yeats proclaims, “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”
(A terrible beauty is born)
Yeats repeats that last line in the second stanza and to concluded the poem in order to drive home the point that everything has
"changed utterly" for him, for the martyrs of the Easter Rising, and for Ireland. As for "a terrible
beauty is born" I read this as a commentary on the country itself.
It's physical beauty is unparalleled but it is impossible to separate the Emerald Isle's beauty from its
rather blood soaked history.
Constance Markiewicz,who was an officer in the Republican Brotherhood
That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill. loud and high-pitched
What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers? hunted This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse; Patrick Pearse,teacher,temporarypresident of the
This other his helper and friend Republic,proclaimed in the Easter Rising,shot by the British
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end, Thomas MacDonagh,English Professor at University College,Dublin
So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout. proud He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part badly behaved person.Yeats is referring
In the casual comedy; to Major John MacBride,husband of Maud Gonne,
He, too, has been changed in his turn, with whom Yeats was in love at the time
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
• *The second stanza singles out individual martyrs, killed or imprisoned for their
activities, among them his childhood friend Countess Markiewicz (nee Constance Gore- Booth) and Major John MacBride, the husband of Maud Gonne, the woman Yeats had loved long and unrequited. Although he had considered MacBride merely “a drunken, vainglorious lout,” Yeats acknowledges that he too has been ennobled by his heroism.
*Stanza 3 notes paradoxically that these martyrs are all changed in that they have become unchanging: their hearts, united by one purpose, have become unchanging as stone, in disturbing contrast to the living stream of ordinary human life. In a characteristic shift of mood, Yeats uses the stone metaphor to warn of the danger of fanaticism: “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of
the heart.”
• Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud, edge Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive, splashes And hens to moor-cocks call;
• Minute by minute they live: aquatic birds The stone's in the midst of all.
*The final stanza raises but quickly abandons essentially unanswerable questions about the duration and value of the Irish struggle and the trustworthiness of England’s promise
of independence. Instead Yeats confines himself to the more modest task of paying tribute to the fallen patriots by naming them with the tenderness of a mother naming
her child. While acknowledging the awful finality of death, Yeats proclaims the meaningfulness of their enterprise, in which they doffed the “motley” of their former
clownish days to don green in a life both terrible and beautiful in its purpose.
• Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice? be enough That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child say softly When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall? Arms and legs No, no, not night but death; unnecessary Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith refers to English promises to implement
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough the Home Rule Bill after the end of the
To know they dreamed and are dead; war
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride Irish Labour leader,organizer of Citizen Army,executed
And Connolly and Pearse when he recovered from his wounds
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn, symbolic colour of Irish republicanism Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
With rare compression, Yeats not only succeeds in expressing
his ambivalence about
patriotism in general and about the Irish cause in particular, but
he also allows the reader to follow sympathetically the shifts
of thought and feeling in the troubled mind of a poet who is
both critical and compassionate.
W.B.YEATS
