![]() ![]() This had become something of a habit over the twenty-seven years since he had first met and fallen in love with her and, as he put it, "the troubling of my life began." From then on he had devoted a considerable part of that life to Maud Gonne and to the idea of Maud Gonne, writing poems and plays inspired by her and by her incomplete refusal of him, trying to rescue her from the mind-boggling series of personal catastrophes that made up her life, communing with her astrally, and even, eventually (a fact that should cheer the hearts of unrequited lovers everywhere), sleeping with her, in Paris, in 1908, "the long years of fidelity," as another of his lovers commented, "rewarded at last." But as Yeats himself said, "the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul." By 1916 Yeats was over fifty and wanted to be married and to produce an heir. He seems to be giving up the hope that he can ever be a participant at life’s feast, feeling doomed to be a perpetual observer, one who will always see what he yearns to have, with no hope of ever achieving it.In the summer of 1916 William Butler Yeats asked Maud Gonne to marry him. But now he feels he will never experience that flight in its full glory. In the poem’s symbolic argument, Yeats seems to feel that a life-mate would who have been a muse who would would have lifted him and his poetry to new heights. If he had found a life-mate, he too would be “flying off” with the rest of the swans when the time comes! At that moment, their number would be sixty, rather than fifity-nine! But as things stand, he knows he will be deprived of that great experience and can only wonder where it is that they will land. The poem’s last stanza bodies forth the poet’s feeling of earthbound exclusion. ![]() I appreciate your making a point of Yeats’s particularity in enumerating the total number of swans as fifty-nine and elsewhere in the same essay you relate the problem of his twofold rejection by Maud Gonne and her daughter as well as the well-known fact that swans stay together as couples for life.īut I think you miss the point of the number fifty-nine, which is an odd number! it points to the fact that all the rest of the swans seemingly have found their mates, whereas only one of them has not! Obviously, the swan that cannot find a life-mate is a symbol for the lonely poet, who sees the “odd” swan as an objective correlative for himself. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. Yeats was in favour of Irish independence but, in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’ which respond to the Easter Rising, he reveals himself to be uneasy with the violent and drastic political and military methods adopted by many of his compatriots. She knew she could be of more use to him as a muse than as a wife or lover. ![]() Yeats asked her to marry him several times, but she always refused. Throughout much of his life, a woman named Maud Gonne was his muse. And yet, at the same time, there is a directness to his work which makes readers feel personally addressed, and situates his work always at one remove from more famous modernist poets (such as T. His late work, such as his 1927 poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, about growing old, show a thoughtful and contemplative poet whose imagery and references defy easy exegesis (what exactly does the ancient city of Byzantium represent in this poem?). As his career developed and literary innovations came with modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, Yeats’s work retained its focus on traditional verse forms and rhyme schemes, but he became more political, more allusive, and more elliptical. His first collection, Crossways, appeared in 1889 when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry bore the clear influence of Romanticism. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |