W.B. YEATS
Wednesday, 21 April 2021 09:52
YEATS' BACKGROUND
- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
- From Romantic to Modernist
- Yeats straddles both worlds and in some ways fuses them, in the best of his poems
- Adopted an Eastern/Hindu idea, incarnation, cycles of existence/life in different forms
- The real vs the ideal
- How sound makes sense
POEMS
- Dealing with escape:
○ 1190 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'
○ 1188 'The Stolen Child'
- Dealing with Maud Gonne:
○ 1190 'When You are Old'
○ 1191 'No Second Troy'
○ 1200 'Leda and the Swan'
○ 1194 'Easter 1916'
○ 1190 'Adam's Curse'
- Dealing with Coole Park/the Yeatsian Preference for the Antithetical over the Primary
○ 1192 'The Wild Swans at Coole'
○ 1193 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'
○ 1198 'To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee'
○ 1208 'Under Ben Bulben'
○ 1196 'The Second Coming'
○ 1196 'A Prayer For My Daughter'
○ 1204 'Lapis Lazuli'
SOUND CREATES SENSE
- Look at the prosody (patters of rhythm and sound) of the lines
- Rhythm:
○ Repetition: established mood and tone
○ Caesura (both medial [middle of line] and terminal [end of line]) : silence is also a sound
○ Enjambment (run on line)
- Sound:
○ Onomatopoeia (sounds)
○ Assonance (vowels)
○ Alliteration (consonants)
○ Hard sounds (plosive [B], fricatives [rub together])
○ Soft sounds (nasal, liquids, glides)
POEMS DEALING WITH ESCAPE
The Lake of Innisfree
- First two stanzas talk about wanting to go
- Last stanza will go
- Last two lines: "pavements grey"
, ○ London, Sligo
- Structural principle: repetition
○ Incantatory effect
Central quality of prayer is repetition
○ Trance state allows to be carried away from reality
From London to nature
- Job of poet is to be a secular priest/spiritualism
- If you put out sweet, sweet will come
○ "bee loud glade"
Assonance
Alliteration
Onomatopoeia
○ "a hive for the honey bee"
Assonance
Alliteration
Onomatopoeia
- Benediction: blessing
○ Poem is secular benediction
○ Using sweetness of word to convey
Rhythm, and repetition
- Simple rhythm and compound rhythm
- Spondee is a two stressed syllables
- Phyrric is a 2 unstressed syllables
Wednesday, 21 April 2021 09:52
YEATS' BACKGROUND
- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
- From Romantic to Modernist
- Yeats straddles both worlds and in some ways fuses them, in the best of his poems
- Adopted an Eastern/Hindu idea, incarnation, cycles of existence/life in different forms
- The real vs the ideal
- How sound makes sense
POEMS
- Dealing with escape:
○ 1190 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'
○ 1188 'The Stolen Child'
- Dealing with Maud Gonne:
○ 1190 'When You are Old'
○ 1191 'No Second Troy'
○ 1200 'Leda and the Swan'
○ 1194 'Easter 1916'
○ 1190 'Adam's Curse'
- Dealing with Coole Park/the Yeatsian Preference for the Antithetical over the Primary
○ 1192 'The Wild Swans at Coole'
○ 1193 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'
○ 1198 'To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee'
○ 1208 'Under Ben Bulben'
○ 1196 'The Second Coming'
○ 1196 'A Prayer For My Daughter'
○ 1204 'Lapis Lazuli'
SOUND CREATES SENSE
- Look at the prosody (patters of rhythm and sound) of the lines
- Rhythm:
○ Repetition: established mood and tone
○ Caesura (both medial [middle of line] and terminal [end of line]) : silence is also a sound
○ Enjambment (run on line)
- Sound:
○ Onomatopoeia (sounds)
○ Assonance (vowels)
○ Alliteration (consonants)
○ Hard sounds (plosive [B], fricatives [rub together])
○ Soft sounds (nasal, liquids, glides)
POEMS DEALING WITH ESCAPE
The Lake of Innisfree
- First two stanzas talk about wanting to go
- Last stanza will go
- Last two lines: "pavements grey"
, ○ London, Sligo
- Structural principle: repetition
○ Incantatory effect
Central quality of prayer is repetition
○ Trance state allows to be carried away from reality
From London to nature
- Job of poet is to be a secular priest/spiritualism
- If you put out sweet, sweet will come
○ "bee loud glade"
Assonance
Alliteration
Onomatopoeia
○ "a hive for the honey bee"
Assonance
Alliteration
Onomatopoeia
- Benediction: blessing
○ Poem is secular benediction
○ Using sweetness of word to convey
Rhythm, and repetition
- Simple rhythm and compound rhythm
- Spondee is a two stressed syllables
- Phyrric is a 2 unstressed syllables
