Who among us, especially if we live in a town or city, hasn’t wished to leave the bustle of urban living behind in favour of a simpler existence? In this, one of his most oft-anthologised poems, Yeats describes his intention to go to Innisfree and build a small cabin of clay and wattles, to grow beans and keep bees for honey, and to live on his own there.
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,Īnd a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made For among other things, ‘Easter 1916’ is about the tension between change and permanence, steadfastness and flexibility
Those words that end three of the four long stanzas that make up ‘Easter 1916’, with each new repetition of them changing them slightly. As Yeats’s famous final line has it, ‘A terrible beauty is born.’ The poem is about renouncing the hold of the world upon us, and attaining something higher than the physical or sensual.Īnother poem about conflicting feelings experienced by an Irishman during the events of the First World War – here, though, the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, while Britain was busy fighting another war against Germany. Yeats wrote ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ in 1927, when he was in his early sixties, and published a year later in The Tower. This is partly what ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is about. These are, perhaps, inevitable thoughts once we reach a certain age: they certainly came to Yeats in his later years, and he frequently wrote about growing old. Growing older, feeling out of touch with the new generation superseding you, feeling surplus to requirements, waiting for death. The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,įish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long In one another’s arms, birds in the trees, The idea that soldiers in the First World War fought ‘for King and Country’ made for good propaganda, and was undoubtedly true in the case of many English poets (Edward Thomas, for instance) but it wasn’t true of everyone … Instead, his allegiance is to his Kiltartan Cross, a small parish in the county of Galway in Ireland, a remote part of the British ‘empire’ which is unlikely to be greatly troubled by the war: this Irish airman’s sacrifice (or heroic victories) matter little to the ‘poor’ of Kiltartan, who are likely to remain poor whatever happens in the mighty clash of empires that was the First World War. What was it like to be an Irish soldier fighting for Britain in the First World War, but to be an Irishman longing for independence from the British? This conflict is the focus of this soliloquy, one of Yeats’s finest poems about the fight for Irish independence during, and just after, WWI.ĭespite Yeats’s title, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, there is little sense of patriotism at the national level displayed by the speaker. The poem takes in Julius Caesar, Helen of Troy, and Michelangelo, but throughout we find the refrain: ‘Like a long-legged fly upon the stream’.Ħ. Silence is found elsewhere in Yeats’s work – in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, for instance, he longs to escape to the tranquillity of the isle mentioned in that poem’s title – but ‘Long-Legged Fly’ is about, in Yeats’s own words, how the mind moves upon silence. So begins this classic Yeats poem, one of the great poems about silence. And dreams are delicate and vulnerable – hence ‘Tread softly’. But I’m only a poor man, and obviously the idea of making the sky into a blanket is silly and out of the question, so all I have of any worth are my dreams.
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