"Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings." -- W. H. Auden

I Romantic, dreamy, escapist, anti-Victorian

a) The theme of this group of poems is that life is unsatisfactory; the poems voice a desire for perfection, for the unattainable.

b) Notice the conscious "embroidery" of these poems; the use of assonance and consonance:

"The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland"

"Old silence bids its chosen race rejoice,/ Whatever ravelled waters rise and fall/ Or stormy silver fret the gold of day," ( 30-33). Consonance in the repetition of the 'r' sounds in race, rejoice, whatever, ravelled, waters, rise, stormy, silver, fret; assonance in the 'i' sounds in silence, bids, its, rise; assonance in the 'o' sounds in old, chosen,stormy, gold.

c) Notice, too, the lush descriptions of nature

d) And the use of Irish mythologies and legend ( Aengus, fairyland, Stolen Child)

II Direct, terse, simple, clear imagery, sometimes political

"A Coat" is a good example of this phase of Yeats' poetry in style and content; indeed, this poem demonstrates that style is inseparable from content. No lush descriptions of nature, no reliance on obvious poetic devices such as assonance and consonance. The subject of the poem is his announcement that he is finished with his previous style of poetry. His "song" ( = poetry) was a "coat" -- "embroidered," made of "old mythologies," but others have imitated him ('the fools caught it,/ Wore it in the world's eyes/ As thought they'd wrought it,"; But Yeats is finished with this style, " for there's more enterprise/ In walking naked." Naked= unadorned, honest, stripped-down, bare, personal, simple, direct. In this poem is announces that his new style will serve his content; they are one; style and content are naked.

"Adam's Curse"

We see this same style at work in "Adam's Curse"; this poem is addressed to Maude Gonne, the Irish revolutionary whom Yeats loved all his life. The subject of the poem is the a) curse of work ( the work of writing poetry, the work in being beautiful, and the work of love) and the b) intensely personal revelation of his grief at pursuing this woman who welcomed him as a friend but rejected him as a lover.

Notice the almost-conversational pattern of the words. The subject and the style are simple, clear, personal, unadorned.

"Easter 1916" marks an event that changed Irish moderates into revolutionaries. Though he condemns "Hearts with one purpose alone" as "Enchanted to a stone," these martyrs "Are changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born."

III Combines directness with metaphysical contemplativeness; in this period Yeats prophecies a bad future, the end of the Christian era.

Metaphysical means an interest in the incorporeal, supernatural, visionary, mystical. Yeats joined a mystical group, the Rosacrucians who were an order devoted to occult lore; he also dabbled in automatic writing, etc.

"The Second Coming": Yeats had a vision of the cycles of history; each cycle lasted 2000 years. From 1 A.D., the year supposedly of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, to 1919 has been the Christian era; towards the end of the millennium, as we approach the year 2000 (when another age will be born) the momentum of the present age slows, falters and "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Yeats expresses his vision of the cycles of history through the image of the gyre, the cone-pattern of the falcon's flight: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer." The momentum of the gyre and the cone pattern are rather like the movement of a spinning top: in the beginning, the motion of the top is stabilizing, but as it slows down the top begins to wobble, to destabilize; thus, in the last hundred years of the Christian cycle, the momentum is slowing and destabilization takes place. Yeats' best evidence of destabilization was the "blood-dimmed tide" of World War I. This poem was written several years after The Great War.

"Sailing to Byzantium": This poem pays tribute to two famous poems, "Kubla Khan" and "Ode to a Nightingale." Byzantium has a similar connotation to Xanadu; both are far away, exotic. Byzantium has the added connotation of a spiritual and artistic center as it was the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Both cities are metaphors for a creative state or a platonic heaven of ideal forms.

Yeats, now an old man, has decided that life is no place for the old: "That is no country for old men." That country -- life -- is "sensual"; "the young in one another's arms"; birds, fish are mentioned in this first stanza suggestive of procreation. Yeats identifies himself as one of the "Monuments of unaging intellect." He's referring to the fact that he is famous and revered as a poet, almost as dead poets are revered; though he is still alive, he sees himself as a monument which is erected to the memory of a dead person. Obviously he feels rather dead. And "intellect" as he is using it here is not a positive quality; he doesn't care for the intellect, he cares for the creative, even the procreative. He feels impotent, perhaps literally as well as figuratively.

In stanza 2, he describes old age: "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick." Therefore he renounces his almost-dead state and imaginatively "sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium."

In stanza 3, he calls for "sages" to transform him, to "Consume my heart away; sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal" and "gather" him into the "artifice of eternity." Art (artifice) is the only thing that is immortal or eternal; human life is not eternal; and though he desires youth, he loathes aging and would prefer not to "take/ My bodily form from any natural thing." Instead, he would like to be reborn in Byzantium (presumably a neo-platonic heaven of perfect forms) as a golden nightingale (thus the reference to Keats' poem): "a form as Grecian goldsmiths make/ Of hammered gold and gold enameling. . . set upon a golden bough to sing/ To lords and ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past, or passing, or to come." As a poet he does sing of what is past, or passing, or to come; his desire for transformation in Byzantium as a golden song bird is a longing to die to this world and meld with the ideal form of poetic beauty, to become pure poetry, immortal, ageless.

"Byzantium": "Gradually the master-image of Byzantium must have assumed dominance of the scene. The completed poem has often been taken as a representation of the afterlife, and Yeats wished this interpretation to be possible; but to him, it seems safe to say, 'Byzantium' was primarily a description of the act of making a poem. The poet, who is imprecisely identified with the Byzantine emperor, takes the welter of images and masters them in an act of creation. This mastery is so astonishing to the poet himself that he calls the creation of his imagination superhuman. The image of the golden bird, 'more miracle than bird or handiwork,' may be understood to represent a poem; the bird sings, as do Yeats's poems, either like the cocks of Hades of rebirth -- the continuing cycle of reincarnating human life, or with greater glory of the eternal reality or beatitude which transcends the cycles 'and all complexities of mire or blood.' Never had he realized so completely the awesome drama of the creative act" (Richard Ellman. Yeats: The Man and the Masks 269).

IV Impatient of convention, bawdy, the physical dominates. Only the mad see life as unity.

"Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop": Crazy Jane is a lunatic, a homeless woman, whom conventional people try to reform; she wants none of that, for she knows that life is suffering; that there is a dark side to everything; life is a paradox symbolized by the physiological fact that "love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement."

"The Circus Animal's Desertion"

In this last phase of his poetry, Yeats laments that he is too old to write great poetry, and yet some of his greatest poetry is about how he can no longer write great poetry, another paradox that Crazy Jane would understand. In "The Circus Animal's Desertion" Yeats develops this metaphor: circus animals = the images, the metaphors, the similes of his poetry; circus animals suggest the exotic, the entertaining, etc. But he is too old now and the circus animals have deserted him. In the second stanza he says that all he can do is to write about things he's already written about, "enumerate old themes"; he then lists some of the subjects he's written about , the Irish legends, the plays he wrote for the Irish National Theater, and Maude Gonne. In the last two lines of this stanza he says that "Players and painted stage took all my love,/ And not those things that they were emblems of." In other words, he's loved the metaphors, the similes, the images, more than the things they stood for. Then in the third stanza he contemplates the origin of those metaphors, "Those masterful images"; and decides that their origin was real life, "A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,/ Old kettles, old bottles, . . . the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart." Now that he is old, his imagination (the "ladder" that has allowed him to climb from real life to poetry has gone) and all that is left him is the heart: he must "lie down where all the ladders start,/ In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.