Yeats

1
Yeatss Poems

• ENGL 203
• Dr. Fike

2
Review

• What main event cast a pall over the early part
  of the Modern period?
• What was the key innovation in poetry? What term
  did Eliot coin to go along with this?
• In fiction, a different sense of time led to what
  technique?
• What work suggests interest in the primitive?

3
Answers

• WW I See Prufrock and the opening of The
  Wasteland (from Chaucer unit).
• The image. Cf. objective correlative.
• Stream of consciousness. Joyces Ulysses is the
  best example. Conrads novel is NOT stream of
  consciousness.
• Heart of Darkness.

4
Outline for Yeatss Poems

• Yeatss Romantic Legacy
• Ys Concern with Mortality
• Ys Concept of Antinomies
• Yeatss Use of Myth
• Yeats on Art

5
Summary of Key Points in Yeats

• Romanticism A major characteristic of the
  Modern period (see next slide)
• 18th century and Victorian Reason gt imagination
• Romanticism and Modernism Imagination gt reason
• Irish nationalismCeltic revival, esp. in theater
  (somewhat like the emphasis on the primitive)
• Used a variety of myths Christian, classical,
  his own like Blake, private myth-making
• Maud Gonnethe woman who got away
• Terms antinomies, gyres
• Important themes art, aging, sexuality

6
Periodicity

• 18th Century
• Romantic Period
• Victorian Period
• Modern Period

7
The Lake Isle of Innisfree

• http//faculty.winthrop.edu/fikem/Courses/ENGL202
  03/20320Innisfree.htm
• wattle poles intertwined with twigs, reeds,
  or branches for use in construction, as of walls
  or fences (American Heritage Dictionary)
• What do we know about the speaker?
• Do you hear echoes of WW here? Of Thoreau? What
  about the Bible?
• What does the poem say about time?

8
Innisfree

• Speaker Tired of the male urban setting
  (roadway and pavement) , he is drawn by the
  feminine rural setting (glade and water).
• Key points imagination, memory, eye and ear
  (parallel to WW)
• Allusions
• Prodigal son I will arise and go to my
  father (Luke 1518). Has the speaker been a
  prodigal by being in the city, or will he be
  prodigal by going to Innisfree? Probably the
  former because the allusion suggests the
  restoration that presumably follows his return to
  Innisfree.
• Bean rows These echo Walden and convey a sense
  that Innisfree is a pastoral retreat.
• WW References to things that one can be seen or
  heard (cf. eye and ear in TA) the same view
  of nature as WW memory activates the
  imagination in the final stanza.
• Time Note the breaking of chronological order
• The roadway suggests clock time
• slow in line 5
• CityInnisfreeclock time timelessnesschronos
  kairos

9
The Song of Wandering Aengus

• http//faculty.winthrop.edu/fikem/Courses/ENGL202
  03/20320Aengus.htm

10
Aengus

• Romantic quest poem cf. esp. Shelleys Alastor
  and Keatss La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
  Coleridges Rime is also in the background.
• Nature is present here The Irish landscape,
  concrete natural details, simplicity, homeliness.
• The poem draws on Irish myth and therefore
  attempts to rouse national consciousness.
• It is a personal utterance by a speaker (I) who
  has something in common with Yeats namely, that
  he is to the maid as Yeats is to Maud Gonne.
• In other words, Yeats associates himself and the
  people he knew with figures in Irish myth the
  maid in the poem is Maud. Both Yeats and his
  poems persona sought a woman without success
  thus his imagination mythologized his life.
• http//www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ACgonne.htm

11
POINT

• Yeats moved from early Romanticism (Innisfree,
  Song of Wandering Aengus) to later disillusion,
  especially in terms of the physical body.
• Poems about Mortality 
• "Among School Children"
• "Sailing to Byzantium"
• "The Wild Swans at Coole"

12
Among School Children

• Stanza 2 a Ledaean body Maud
• Stanza 3 Imagines Maud as a little girl
• Children vs. old people youth vs. age antinomy
  (next slide)
• Y as old man in stanza 1 A sixty-year-old
  smiling public man.
• Scarecrow image in stanza 6 Old clothes upon
  old sticks to scare a bird.
• Art is permanent people age art does not life
  vs. art
• Art in stanza 7 a marble or a bronze repose
• Last stanza, however, suggests a kind of
  immortality in a timeless paradise through
  identity with art.
• How can we tell the dancer from the dance?
  Answer We cannot because both are immortal.

13
Antinomies

• Definition an apparent contradiction between
  valid principles or conclusions that seems
  equally necessary and unreasonable a conflict,
  opposition, or contradiction (American Heritage
  Dictionary).
• Very much like contraries in Blake.

14
Examples

• Reason vs. emotion
• Science vs. instinct
• Practical action vs. imagination Innisfree
• Youth vs. age School Children
• Body vs. soul Crazy Jane
• Nature vs. art Byzantium poems
• Power vs. knowledge Leda

15
Sailing to Byzantium

• Begins with a lament about youths disregard of
  old people Monuments of unageing intellect.
• Youthbodyold agemind. Antinomies.
• The birds in the trees are real birds, unlike
  the metal ones see in Byzantium.
• The speaker is still alive he has sailed to
  Byzantium (present-day Istanbul), the holy city
  of art, on the wings of the imagination. See
  line 22 a dying animal Ys condition. He
  merely IMAGINES leaving nature at death and
  entering the artifice of eternity (line 24).
• The final stanza is about the same association
  with art that we have in Among School Children
  Yeats imagines the afterlife as an eternity of
  art or artifice.
• Note There is more on this poem below.

16
The Wild Swans at Coole

• http//faculty.winthrop.edu/fikem/Courses/ENGL202
  03/20320Wild20Swans.htm

17
Wild Swans

• October old age
• Yeats 1865-1939
• 1916 is the 19th summer
• my count of years, swans, or both
• wheeling gyre-like flight
• NOT parallel to TA I have looked upon those
  brilliant creatures, etc. The swans make his
  heart sore.
• Unwearied still, lover by loverthe swans are
  an image of immortality.
• Passion or conquestYeats remained interested
  in sex into old age.
• Eye and ear?
• Gyre It is pronounced jire (soft j as in
  jar) and rhymes with fire.

18
The Coming of Wisdom with Time

• Though leaves are many, the root is one
• Through all the lying days of my youth
• I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun
• Now I may wither into the truth.
• POINT Knowledge mellows into wisdom.
• Antimony youth vs. wisdom.
•  

19
Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop

• What antinomies do you see here?
• Read and discuss the poem.

20
Antinomies in Crazy Jane

• Fair and foul
• Soul and hole
• Grave and bed
• Heaven and sty
• Lowliness and pride
• Sole and whole
• Religious and secular
• Chaste and sexual
• Love and excrement

21
The Bishop in Crazy Jane

• Bishop a former divinity student who had
  courted Jane in his youth. She rejected him in
  favor of a wild, disreputable lover Jack the
  journeyman. As soon as he got enough authority,
  the Bishop-to-be had Jack banished, but Jane has
  remained faithful to her lover (at least, in
  spirit) (Unterecker).
• The bishops interest in Jane has evidently
  dwindled to concern for her soul only.

22
Crazy Jane Herself

• She lives alone in squalor.
• Her friends are gone.
• She sleeps alone.
• Yet she renounces the bishops advice.

23
Key Words

• pitched love sets up its mansion as one would
  pitch a tent
• sole or wholesoul and hole are antinomies.
• The bishop thinks that soul is all that counts.
• Jane knows that you need both soul and hole
  (sexuality)
• Yeats I want to exorcise that slut, Crazy
  Jane, whose language has become unendurable.

24
Hole with Soul

• http//youtube.com/watch?vUeLXwFRKK_Y

25
The Moral of Crazy Jane

• What do YOU think it is?
• Write possible morals in your notebook.

26
Possible Morals

• A woman cannot be fulfilled and remain a virgin.
• You cannot know Platonic love without physical
  love.
• The universe is by nature a combination of fair
  and foul.
• Only in experiencing everything, fair and foul,
  can the soul be made whole. Only by being torn
  i.e., made more than one can it ultimately be
  made sole i.e., one (Unterecker).

27
Yeatss Use of Myth

• Classical myth Leda and the Swan
• What kind of poem is it?
• What marks the major break in the poem?
• What creates a sense of violence and motion?
• What is the relationship between the poem and
  classical myth?
• What is the answer to the final question?

28
Answers

• Petrarchan sonnet.
• The swans orgasm.
• Scansion dactyls
• STAG ger ing
• TER ri fied
• LOOS en ing
• In DIFF er ent
• Zeus (swan) rapes Leda their offspring are Helen
  (who causes the Trojan war) and Clytemnestra (who
  helps murder her husband, Agamemnon after he
  returns from the Trojan War).
• It is unusual for a sonnet to end with a
  question. Of course, the answer is NO. The last
  word an off rhyme or slant rhyme. So the line
  acts out an answer to the question it asks.

29
More on Swan

• The swan (a god) is a symbol of
  antitheses/antinomies reconciled in him,
  knowledge and power exist together. For human
  beings, this is not usually the case.
• The Trojan war and its aftermath are a good
  example of the DISUNITY of knowledge and power.
  Agamemnon has power but not knowledge and is
  killed by his wife and her lover.

30
Yeatss Use of Christian Myth

• The Magi
• The magi are disappointed they want another
  birth.
• Parallel to Ys own inability to believe in
  Christ.
• Compare to Eliots The Journey of the Magi a
  good RP topic.

31
Yeatss Own Mythology

• The Second Coming DISCUSSION
• What is the key image here?
• What is Spiritus Mundi?
• What connection might there be to WW I?

32
The Second Coming

• The poem is about mortality. Yeats was old and
  facing death he may have taken some comfort in
  the idea that history was about to end an era.
• Imagery falcon and falconer spiral/gyre.
• WW I blood-dimmed tide and ceremony of
  innocence.
• Spiritus Mundi (spirit of the world) may be the
  collective unconscious the storehouse of
  archetypal symbols. Its source of this
  particular image is in ancient Egypt, which is
  felt to be impervious to the humanitarian,
  individualistic tendency of Christianity
  (Rosenthal).
• See Matthew 2429-31 for a version of the second
  coming cf. Johns vision of the anti-Christ in
  Revelation.
• The poem is a Greater Romantic Lyric.

33
Gyres

• The end of an age, which always receives the
  revelation of the character of the next age, is
  represented by the coming of the gyre to its
  place of greatest expansion and of the other to
  that of its greatest contraction. At the present
  moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike
  that before the birth of Christ which was
  narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest
  expansion. The revelation which approaches will
  however take its character from the contrary
  movement of the interior gyre (Yeats in Michael
  Robartes and the Dancer).

34
Ys Gyres

• http//www.yeatsvision.com/Geometry.html
• http//www.crystalinks.com/gyresyeats.html

35
Yeatss Poems about Art Lapis Lazuli

• Lapis lazuli is An opaque azure-blue to
  deep-blue gemstone of lazurite (American
  Heritage Dictionary).
• It has been valued throughout the ages as a link
  to the all-knowing sources of knowledge and for
  invoking wisdom (http//sassyandtwisted.com/gems.
  htm).
• Various arts are depicted here visual art,
  music, literature (poetry, drama).

36
Lazuli

• Stanzas 2-5 defend the art condemned by the
  hysterical women in stanza 1. The imagery here
  relates to WW I.
• Yeats favors art that allows people to face death
  positively not with hysteria but with ancient,
  glittering eyes (last line). In stanza 2,
  tragic figures who are gay in the face of death,
  unlike the hysterical women tragedy gives
  pleasure.
• Stanza 3 Sculptors who are gay in defeat
  decline and riseall things fail, but they are
  built again.
• Stanza 4 Parallel to Keatss Ode on a Grecian
  Urnthe poem presents and moves into a scene on
  lapis lazuli imagination is active here (a
  Romantic characteristic).
• Stanza 5 Imagination is active here too
  interplay of artist, object, and audience (think
  of these as a triangle).
• Watercourse or avalanche?
• Snow or blossoms?
• Ties together the 3 arts gaiety in tragic
  literature (2), gaiety in the visual arts (3),
  and gaiety in music (4-5) all of these are
  integrated on the lapis lazuli.

37
Lazuli

• Gaiety is now a positive term, unlike in the
  first stanza. Now it parallels contemplative
  detachment.
• The conflict is between art and the world
  hysterical women parallel Maud Gonne who
  preferred politics over art.
• POINT We should regard negative things in life
  as we would view a work of art or a playwith
  detached curiosity. Cf. Keatss idea of
  negative capability.

38
Sailing to Byzantium

• An example of Ys myth making.
• Byzantium is Ys holy city of the
  imagination/art present-day Istanbul in Turkey.
• Imagination is the means of sailingof transport
  by imagination we can SAIL to Byzantium, but we
  can only DWELL there after death.
• Speaker represents Yeats, the man/artist, and is
  still alive.
• Real bird here, not the metal ones of
  Byzantium. Bird reconciles opposites
  possible only after deathleaves nature at death
  and enters the artifice of eternity (cf. Among
  School Children).
• Art has a divine functionthe transcendence of
  time and death the artists role is thus to
  transcend time (last line).
• Antinomy youth vs. age. Youthbodyagemind.

39
Byzantium

• Now the speaker is one of the initiated, watching
  souls arrive therefore, this poem is about the
  speaker in the afterlife.
• Stanzas 1 and 2 the physical world is being
  left behind 1 sets the scene 2 introduces a
  spirit in Byzantium.
• Stanza 3 the golden bird represents a poem (it
  sings, as do Ys poems) eternal reality that
  transcends cycles of reincarnation.
• Stanzas 3 4 give details of the dancing place.
• Stanza 4 gives purgatorial flames.
• Stanza 5 spirits begin a dance, and dancing
  signals Unity of Being (of body and soul). All
  thought becomes an image, and the soul / Becomes
  a body (15th phase of the moon).
• END