William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was a poet who modernized and shaped Irish poetry. His family was part of the Anglo Irish Protestant ascendancy; however, he wanted to be able to reconcile the British and Irish Catholic tradition through his poetry. He lived a poor life in his childhood and his family never was financially stable. His father kept moving the family from England to Ireland trying to make it as an artist. It was though that Yeats would follow in that path till it was apparent that his talents were in poetry. As mentioned earlier, he wanted to unite the different views of British and Catholic tradition so he attended political debates to get a feel for the issues. This sparked a lot of creativity in his mind which influenced his poetry.

Another main influence of his poetry came after meeting Maud Gonne. She quickly became the love of his life and a huge inspiration to his work. He was a victim of unrequited love and she refused to marry him. All of the beauty and love that Yeats refers to in his poetry have some relation to him and I really noticed it in one of his poems called, “The Wild Swans at Coole”.

This poem is about a person who walks down to the water every autumn to admire the beauty of the swans. He takes into account the beauty of the surroundings as well and that of the swans and this is usually what had cheered him up in the past. This had been a ritual for this man for nineteen years now.

After the first two stanzas, it shows that the man’s feeling has changed since the previous eighteen years by saying, “And now my heart is sore./ All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,/ The first time on this shore”. I think that this poem may have been written after his poem, “No Second Troy”. If this is true, then Yeats has finally come to the realization that he will never be with Maude Gonne and maybe his outlook on the world has changed. Maybe he can no longer see the beauty of the world, because this woman was his inspiration for seeing the world’s beauty. It really seems like this woman had had a great impact on him and this is what happens to people who suffer from unrequited love.

The next stanza talks about how the swans have never changed making it apparent that just the man has changed. Even though the swans have the same love for on another he is unable to be happy with this love anymore. While reading this stanza, I felt that the man was feeling jealous and maybe wanted to have the same feelings that these swans have for one another. “Their hearts have not grown old;/ Passion or conquest, wander where they will,/ Attend upon them still.” Even after all this time, the love that these swans is so great that they still feel the same way and this is the greatest passion of the man.

The last stanza left me feeling sad. The poem ends by saying, “Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day/ To find they have flown away?” I think that this is suppose to show that the man is getting increasing depressed and the beauty keeps fading until one day he will not be able to see the beauty of the world at all. I think that Yeats is trying to relay his emotion through this poem by stating that his surroundings are starting to look duller and duller until one day he will not even be able to appreciate things to an extent. It seems to me that Gonne has literally broken Yeats heart and it is going to take a long time for those wounds to heal.