http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/781/ - Read this poem...
look at the lines... what does it mean to you? How does this poem translate in today's society?
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/Innisfree.html - Read this poem... how can these two poems be compared...
http://thecriticalpoet.tripod.com/romantic.html - a bit about the romantic period of writing... it will help you understand the analysis
Read the following analysis of the poem which analyzes it from a romantic viewpoint... this assumes the understanding of the romantic period.In the Late Romantic period, poetry was defined much by it’s supernatural or mystical content. Coleridge says, “that according to the division of labor in ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ his special function was to achieve wonder by a frank violation of natural laws and the ordinary course of events in the poems of which ‘the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural’”(Norton 9). This is true of the poetry of Yeats. However, Yeats is categorized as a modern because of the time period in which he appears. The movement that was going on around Yeats was “the imagist movement, influenced by the philosopher-poet T.E. Hulme’s insistence on hard, clear, precise images and encouraged by the modernist American poet, Ezra Pound, who was then living in London, fought against romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism in poetry”(Norton 1686). Yeats uses both time periods to create a distinctive style. He mixes both his modern myth and his late romantic mysticism and makes an organic whole that is different. I am going to show how Yeats’ work can be seen as late romantic as well as modern.
We can see the use of the supernatural in Yeats’ apocalyptic view of the earth. This is apparent in “Sailing to Byzantium.” To Yeats, Byzantium was the perfect place sitting right in the middle of two very different worlds, Asia and Europe. Byzantium is his ideal and he turns his journey to Byzantium into a supernatural event. Yeats speaks of Byzantium as a place for rejuvenation, a place where the old and dying cannot exist; “That is no country for old men. The young/ In one another’s arms, birds in the trees/ -- Those dying generations-- at their song” (Yeats 1883). “That” is obviously representing Byzantium and he is the old man who is seeking the place where everyone enjoys unity and nature is all around them. Byzantium is Yeats’ myth. It’s a place where people and things are valued and that is what he is in search of. Yeats is tired of the neglect of the natural world. “Whatever is begotten, born, and dies,/ Caught in that sensual music all neglect/ Monuments of unageing intellect”(Yeats 1883). Yeats is not concerned with intellect because it never changes, he wants things to be respected and when we move on to the second stanza we begin to see the supernatural separation occurring.
In the this stanza, Yeats shows that the soul is separate from the “aged man.” He calls the old man “a tattered coat upon a stick, unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing”(Yeats 1883). All the old man is an article of clothing without his soul. Yeats is pointing out a physical insignificance in Byzantium. He says that it is going “to the holy city of Byzantium”(Yeats 1883) because there the souls sing for all the tattered coats. We see the souls making history significant and valued because the souls don’t only sing, but they study “monuments of its own magnificence”(Yeats 1883) unlike where he comes from. That is why he wants to sail to Byzantium.
The spiritual and supernatural continue throughout the next verse. All the sages of the past are evoked by Yeats away from description. In Byzantium, Yeats sees the whole picture or mosaic instead of the individual. The sages are able to be purified in God’s fire; “O sages standing in God’s holy fire as in the gold mosaic of a wall”(1883). However, there is something peculiar to me about the mosaic being holy and at the same time gold. This seems to put a rift in the spirituality of the moment to me and I think that this is a perfect moment when Yeats is mixing the two ideas. He has taken an image and made it modern.
The next images is of Yeats showing fate in a spiral motion coming from the holy fire. He wants to be consumed by the spirituality, so that his soul can live on even if his body doesn’t. “Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, and be the singing masters of my soul. Consume my heart away”(1883). Yeats wants to be captured and brought into eternity and he knows that Byzantium is a place of historical immortality.
In the final stanza, we can really see Yeats working with the late romantic ideas of nature and the supernatural; “Once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing”(1884). Yeats knows that if he wants his soul to move on, then he must separate his body and allow himself to be immortalized in history by “Grecian goldsmiths.” The final lines of the poem show how well Yeats mixes his own time period with the late romantic ideas because he actually states that he wants to become the object or the myth in order to transcend this world. He will truly become like an oracle, but he won’t have his own life. He feels that this is a fair trade as he hails the men and women of Byzantium; “to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past, or passing, or to come”(1884). Yeats knows that Byzantium is both the key to unlocking the past and to understanding the future.
As we move on to the poem of “Byzantium,” we see Yeats actually trying to get to the next plane of existence. Byzantium seems to be that stepping stone. This poem is a good representation of Yeats using the supernatural ideas of the late romantics. The poem begins, “the unpurged images of day recede”(1889). We already encounter this idea of images which he later explains to be somewhere in between shades and men. These images are the original or pure thoughts of a day which is leaving. Yeats is getting ready to depart onto his next journey to the supernatural realm.
As we explore the first stanza, we see Yeats setting up the scene that man is somewhat insignificant is scope of the universe. We see the night coming and he sets us up to see the progression of how small we really are by using the images of sky domes and cathedrals. And all that man is, is mere complexity trapped inside our mortal bodies. He states, “All that man is , all mere complexities, the fury and the mire of human veins”(1889). Yeats, like the romantics, cares for nature and the supernatural and how man fits into that picture. However, the way he goes about showing us this picture is very much in his modern time set.
In the next verse, we begin to see the complexities that Yeats was speaking of earlier. “Before me floats an image, man or shade, shade more than man, more image than a shade”(1889). Yeats sets up a hierarchy for us and really starts to mix the superhuman in with ideas now. The shade is a ghost or a shadow of how life once was floating on the earth confused. It seems to be seeking a place of refuge. It seems to want to be moving into the next dimension, a place that is even beyond the earthly reincarnation of it. Byzantium is the stepping stone to that place and that is why Yeats starts us there in the title, so we can move on to the next place.
Yeats seems to be very consumed with the idea of fate again in this poem and the image of it constantly being spun. In this poem it is shown to us via a mummy’s cloth; “For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth may unwind the winding path:”(1889). Somehow fate will be showing us the way to death which will separate the person from the body and release the soul. He then hails the superhuman; that which doesn’t breath. The superhuman rests between the world that Yeats lives in and the world that he so desperately wants to go to. “Breathless mouths may summon; I hail to the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death”(1889). Yeats is beginning to take his vague images of shade and starting to make them definite. There is a real sense of the living dead in this part which would call to images seen in the “Waste Land” by Eliot, a contemporary of his. However, I believe that the way Yeats uses this image presents a different issue than Eliot. Yeats seems content with this image.
As we venture to the next stanza, we see Yeats setting up another trilogy of ideas, “miracle, bird or golden handiwork”(1889). These three images hark back to the earlier hierarchy of image, shade and man. The miracles seems to be the image as it is higher up that both bird and handiwork. The miracle suggests spirituality or something beyond a human’s limitations as it is something that only God can create. However, the next line, “Planted on the star-lit golden bough”(1889) shows something that is artificial. If the miracle was planted on a golden bough instead of one that is living which would be among the heaven, it would show that there is something that isn’t real. Perhaps it places a situation for the impossibility of a rebirth through a natural method. So Yeats must find a way to get to the next place without actually dying, but rather transcending this reality and actually traveling there somehow. In this image we also see how Yeats so artfully mixes his modern influences with the past. This intellectual reference shows Yeats’ ability to be both romantic and modern.
The end of this stanza, forces us to listen to sounds of death whether they come from Hades or the moon. Yeats is demonstrating the complexities by making his lines fragmented and paradoxical; “Can like the cocks of Hades crow,/ or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud/ in glory of changeless metal/ common bird or petal and all complexities of mire or blood”(1889). What could he mean by scorn aloud in glory of changeless metal? I can suggest that things that are unchanging are proud and that which is scorned by what is to come can’t change. He is telling us that we need to let go in order to progress.
The image of the flame comes up in this poem as well as the one the poem discussed earlier. We see these purifying flames again which help free us of the fury seen in the first stanza. Of course, all of this supernatural action occurs at the witching hour of midnight; “At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit/ Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel have lit,”(1889). In this hour, the flames flair without with lit or fed and “no storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame”(1889). This is a special metaphorical flame that not even water can put out. Not to mention that it constantly refuels itself and recreates itself from itself. This is where the incantations of life happens, where the “blood-begotten spirits come and all complexities leave”(1889). This God-like flame purifies us of the all that holds us back and recreates us like the spirits. However, this flame is beyond burning. It simmers slowly as if to dance on the pavement and forces the on looker to go into a trance. The flame burns within each of us instead of physically burning us. The flame now becomes the image that helps the beginning of the process of transcendence as the fury leaves us.
The time comes at the end for us to be transported to the next dimension. Yeats suggests that a dolphin can swim us across the sea to where he desires to go. “Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood, spirit after spirit”(1890). The dolphin like the soul has the ability to change into spirit and move from one plane to the next. It is a difficult ascent to the next place as the world begins to break down and fresh images are created. “Marbles of the dancing floor break bitter furies of complexity”(1890). Whatever fury of complexity is left is now going through the final break down of the supernatural to achieve the movement on to the higher place. The dolphin despite all of the obstacles still embarks on the “tormented sea.” Yeats shows us, that the soul perseveres and that the supernatural ideas bring us to the next level.
Yeats has truly shown us that he is a talented poet who has a flexibility to be both modern and late romantic. A good contrasting poem to these “Byzantium” poems, which shows his skill as a modern writer who writes in with later romantic ideas is “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” We can see already in the title that there is a sense of wanting to be set free from the confines of life in this poem. “Innisfree” can be separated and then sounds like “in as free” within the lake isle. This poem has a real woodsy sense to it.
The speaker in this poem begins by saying that they want to escape to a small cabin on a lake isle. Much like Thoreau, this poem sounds like a person who wants to escape the reality of society and be free in nature to fully utilize what God has given to us. Yeats rejects technology and prefers to be in the all accepting world of nature; “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made”(1867). The speaker obviously wants all of us to feel the freedom of just leaving society to be in a place of purity.
The picture drawn by this speaker is wonderful. There is a real universality of the feeling of the speaker for peace. “Innisfree” is a fantasy for the speaker as we come to the realization at the end of the poem that the speaker is trapped in modernity and longs to be in the romantic period when people could just escape to the world of nature. However, he realizes that he will only hear “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; while [he] stands on the roadway, or on the pavements grey”(1867). Yeats shows how we are all trapped within the confines of a reality of technology and society that is not necessarily as free as it wants us to believe it is. Yeats wants us to see that each of us in our hearts long to be at one with nature and he expresses that in the last line; “I hear it in the deep heart’s core”(1867). Yeats longs to be emersed in late romantic ideals, but instead is trapped in the time that he was born in where technology and industry have taken priority.
In examining these poems, we can recognize that Yeats in deed masterfully mixes his modern influences with what he admires from the past and artfully creates a new idea for his time. The ideals presented in the late romantic period shine in Yeats’ work and we admire his innovative use of old ideas making his poetry unique among the modern writers.
Answer the following questions about the analysis:- What elements does the writer discuss?
- How effectively does the writer analyze the poems?
- What is the writer trying to prove?
- Does the writer select good poems for the point trying to be made?
- What kinds of quotes are used from the poems?
- What other sources are explored?
- How much quoting is going on?
- How much analyzing is in fact the writers?
- Reflect on you can learn from this piece for your own analysis.
Read your own selected poem and decide what kinds of elements your are going to analyze. (For example: voice, speaker, structure, rhyme scheme, rhythm, alliteration and other sound elements, figurative language using simile, metaphor, or personification, period elements, etc.)
