叶芝诗歌

叶芝诗歌 1. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" Summary The poet declares that he will arise and go to Innisfree, where he will build a small cabin "of clay and wattles made." There, he will have nine bean-rows and a beehive, and live alone in the glade loud with the sound of bees ("the bee-loud glade"). He says that he will have peace there, for peace drops from "the veils of morning to where the cricket sings." Midnight there is a glimmer, and noon is a purple glow, and evening is full of linnet's wings. He declares again that he will arise and go, for always, night and day, he hears the lake water lapping "with low sounds by the shore." While he stands in the city, "on the roadway, or on the pavements grey," he hears the sound within himself, "in the deep heart's core." Form "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is written mostly in hexameter, with six stresses in each line, in a loosely iambic pattern. The last line of each four-line stanza shortens the line to tetrameter, with only four stresses: "And live alone in the bee-loud glade." Each of the three stanzas has the same ABAB rhyme scheme. Formally, this poem is somewhat unusual for Yeats: he rarely worked with hexameter, and every rhyme in the poem is a full rhyme; there is no sign of the half-rhymes Yeats often prefers in his later work. Commentary "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," published in Yeats's second book of poems, 1893's The Rose, is one of his first great poems, and one of his most enduring. The tranquil, hypnotic hexameters recreate the rhythmic pulse of the tide. The simple imagery of the quiet life the speaker longs to lead, as he enumerates each of its qualities, lulls the reader into his idyllic fantasy, until the penultimate line jolts the speaker--and the reader--back into the reality of his drab urban existence: "While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey." The final line--"I hear it in the deep heart's core"--is a crucial statement for Yeats, not only in this poem but also in his career as a whole. The implication that the truths of the "deep heart's core" are essential to life is one that would preoccupy Yeats for the rest of his career as a poet; the struggle to remain true to the deep heart's core may be thought of as Yeats's primary undertaking as a poet. 2. "The Second Coming" Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, whiReel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? analysis one "The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 verse collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses religious symbolism to illustrate Yeats' anguish over the apparent decline of Europe's ruling class, and his occult belief that Western civilization (if not the whole world) was nearing the terminal point of a 2000-year historical cycle. The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.[1] However, the various manuscript revisions of the poem refer to the French and Irish Revolutions as well those of Germany and Russia; as a result, it is unlikely that the poem was solely inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which some claim Yeats viewed as a threat to the aristocratic class he favored.[citation needed] Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail."[citation needed] The sphinx or sphinx-like beast described in the poem had long captivated Yeats' imagination. He wrote the Introduction to his play The Resurrection, "I began to imagine [around 1904], as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction", noting that the beast was "Afterwards described in my poem 'The Second Coming'". However, there are some differences between the two characters, mainly that the figure in the poem has no wings. Critic Yvor Winters has observed, "?,we must face the fact that Yeats' attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying ?C he is Yeats' judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality." Origins of terms The word gyre used in the poem's first line is drawn from Yeats's book A Vision, which sets out a theory of history and metaphysics which Yeats claimed to have received from spirits. The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" are a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe: In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man's estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare. The phrase "stony sleep" is drawn from The Book of Urizen by William Blake (one of the poets Yeats studied most intensely). In Blake's poem, Urizen falls, unable to bear the battle in heaven he has provoked. To ward off the fiery wrath of his vengeful brother Eternals, he frames a rocky womb for himself: "But Urizen laid in a stony sleep / Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity." During this stony sleep, Urizen goes through seven ages of creation-birth as fallen man, until he emerges. This is the man who becomes the Sphinx of Egypt. In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the phrase "the Second Birth", but substituted the phrase "Second Coming" while revising. His intent in doing so is not clear. The Second Coming described in the Biblical Book of Revelation is here anticipated as gathering dark forces that would fill the population's need for meaning with a ghastly and dangerous sense of purpose. Though Yeats's description has nothing in common with the typically envisioned Christian concept of the Second Coming of Christ, as his description of the figure in the poem is nothing at all like the image of Christ, it fits with his view that something strange and heretofore unthinkable would come to succeed Christianity, just as Christ transformed the world upon his appearance. The "spiritus mundi" (literally "spirit of the world") is a reference to Yeats' belief that each human mind is linked to a single vast intelligence, and that this intelligence causes certain universal symbols to appear in individual minds. Allusions to the poem The poem includes several phrases that have become a part of popular culture; such as the line "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Chinua Achebe titled his most famous novel Things Fall Apart (1958), prefacing the book with the poem's first four lines. Achebe's novel adheres to Yeats' theme by evincing the sudden collapse of African societies in the age of European colonialism. The hip hop group The Roots titled their 1999 album Things Fall Apart taking the name from the above novel. The poem is referred to several times directly and indirectly in Stephen King's epic novel The Stand. Joni Mitchell set this poem to lyrics in her song "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" originally on her "Night Ride Home" CD. The PolicAll but a few lines of the poem have been lines of dialogue on the television show The Sopranos, including one episode in which Dr. Melfi tells Tony "The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer". Pulitzer Prize-winning author Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. used "The Second Coming" as the epigraph to his book The Vital Center. More than a half-century later, he explained that the poem had been "less of a clich?? in 1948" than it had become currently.[2] In 1986 Schlesinger, in The Cycles of American History, again referenced this poem with prophetic paraphrase: "Still, let us not be complacent. Should private interest fail today and public purpose thereafter, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, may be slouching toward Washington to be born?" The opening lines were used by The Technical Boy as Mr. Wednesday's eulogy in Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods. Joan Didion's 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, references the poem, as does Nina Coltart's 1993 book "Slouching Toward Bethlehem... and Further Psychoanalytic Explorations", as well as numerous popular songs, movies and novels. Conservative judge Robert H. Bork used the poem as an inspiration for the title of his 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. In response, syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage chose Skipping Towards Gomorrah as the title for his 2003 book (ISBN 0-45-228416-3). The tenth of Robert B. Parker's novels featuring the detective Spenser is titled The Widening Gyre. Librettist Myfanwy Piper included the line "The ceremony of innocence is drowned" into the dialogue of the ghosts of Peter Quint and the former governess, Miss Jessel, in Benjamin Britten's opera, The Turn of the Screw. The anarchist hero of Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta quotes the first three lines of the poem in the chapter "Verwirrung." Adam Cohen, of the New York Times on 12 February 2007[3] commented how the poem has been used more and more as a metaphor for the war in Iraq. The band Electric Six makes a reference to the poem in their song "Jimmy Carter" (from the album Se?or Smoke), which features these lines: "And there's a plague of locusts upon us and there's a nightmare in the swarm. And there's a lion out in the desert slouching to Bethlehem to be born... again." In the finale to the animated series Mighty Max, Max's mentor, Virgil, quotes the poem in reference to the apocalyptic scenario the main villain has brought about. "And now, things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Singaporean poet Ho Joe Han has frequently cited this poem as the defining influence of his career in English literature, maintaining the line "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" as his slogan for the better part of 20 years. Conor Oberst, lead siIn the series Angel, there was an episode entitled "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" which involved a foretelling of the end times. In the sci-fi television series Andromeda, three episodes are titled "The Widening Gyre", "Pitiless as the Sun" and "Its hour come round at last" Portions of the poem are quoted in one episode of the sci-fi television series Babylon 5. Part of the poem is quoted in a cut scene from the sci-fi computer game Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom between Admiral Tolwyn and Senator "Paladin" Taggart. The poem is featured in Oliver Stone's film Nixon, delivered by Richard Helms, Director of the CIA played by Sam Waterson to Richard Nixon played by Anthony Hopkins. It is also alluded to in Stone's 1987 film Wall Street, when Gordon Gekko says to Bud Fox, "So sport, the falcon has heard the falconer." In John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century, the last two lines of the poem are featured as chapter titles. Maria Helena Dolan, a lesbian writer/activist from Atlanta, wrote a regular column called "Slouching Towards Lesbos" in "ETC Magazine," a now-defunct Atlanta Gay publication, from 1980 - 1990. Copies of the columns (still inside the magazine) are housed in the Atlanta History Center Center within a collection entitled "The Atlanta Lesbian and Gay History Thing." San Francisco Bay-area pop group The Loud Family, led by Scott Miller, titled a 1993 EP Slouching Towards Liverpool, employing a reference to the poem to also allude to the hometown of the group's forebears The Beatles. Cabaret duo Kiki and Herb regularly incorporate lines from the poem into live renditions of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", playing upon that song's repeated line, "turn around, bright eyes". The title of the interactive fiction game Slouching Towards Bedlam, which is set partly in Bethlem Hospital (aka Bedlam), is a reference to the poem. Author Nick Bantock makes reference to lines from The Second Coming at the beginning and end in each book of the Griffin and Sabine series. This is remarked upon in his biographical book, The Artful Dodger. Author Matthew Reilly quotes "Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer" as an opening statement which later relates to the anarchy that will be unleashed on the world in his novel Scarecrow. In "A Peanut Christmas", a collection of Peanuts Christmas comics, the poem is referenced at the bottom of page 108. Peppermint Patty dresses as a sheep for the Christmas pageant and trips on a curb. Marcie turns to her and says," Slouching toward Bethlehem, huh sir." In Sam Shepard's play, "Cowboy Mouth" the characterIn Daniel Pinchbeck's book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck references the poem in conjunction with the Apocalypse. In the final episodes of 'The Sopranos' AJ reads the poem and later quotes it to friends. In Jamie Delano's John Constantine Hellblazer,the Original Sins Issue, Constantine refers to the lines "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." In George R. R. Martin's 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag, fictitious rock band the Nazg?l used "The Second Coming" as the lyrics to one of their songs. analysis two Summary The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening "gyre" (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold"; anarchy is loosed upon the world; "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned." The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst "are full of passionate intensity." Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; "Surely the Second Coming is at hand." No sooner does he think of "the Second Coming," then he is troubled by "a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx ("A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun") is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker's sight, but he knows that the sphinx's twenty centuries of "stony sleep" have been made a nightmare by the motions of "a rocking cradle." And what "rough beast," he wonders, "its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Form "The Second Coming" is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as "man" and "sun." Commentary Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, "The Second Coming" is one of Yeats's most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the poem is quite simple--the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a "rough beast," the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering to Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that he described in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats's lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system. The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance--except for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). "The Second Coming" was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats's poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats's own notes: The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre... In other words, the world's trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy, and heterogeneity is now coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner gyre--which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the science and democracy of the outer gyre. The "rough beast" slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker's vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world. This seems quite silly as philosophy or prophecy (particularly in light of the fact that it has not come true as yet). But as poetry, and understood more broadly than as a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of A Vision, "The Second Coming" is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. The poem "The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 verse collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses religious symbolism to illustrate Yeats' anguish over the apparent decline of Europe's ruling class, and his occult belief that Western civilization (if not the whole world) was nearing the terminal point of a 2000-year historical cycle. The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.[1] However, the various manuscript revisions of the poem refer to the French and Irish Revolutions as well those of Germany and Russia; as a result, it is unlikely that the poem was solely inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which some claim Yeats viewed as a threat to the aristocratic class he favored.[citation needed] Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail."[citation needed] The sphinx or sphinx-like beast described in the poem had long captivated Yeats' imagination. He wrote the Introduction to his play The Resurrection, "I began to imagine [around 1904], as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction", noting that the beast was "Afterwards described in my poem 'The Second Coming'". However, there are some differences between the two characters, mainly that the figure in the poem has no wings. Critic Yvor Winters has observed, "?,we must face the fact that Yeats' attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying ?C he is Yeats' judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality." Manuscript variations can be found in Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. References ^ Haugheny, Jim (2002). The First World War in Irish Poetry p.161. Bucknell University Press. ^ Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. (2000). A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917?ª1950. p.510. Houghton Mifflin. ^ What W. B. Yeats??s ??Second Coming?? Really Says About the Iraq War - New York Times Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars, 1984. Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven, 2004. 3."Sailing to Byzantium" Summary The speaker, referring to the country that he has left, says that it is "no country for old men": it is full of youth and life, with the young lying in one another's arms, birds singing in the trees, and An old man, the speaker says, is a "paltry thing," merely a tattered coat upon a stick, unless his soul can clap its hands and sing; and the only way for the soul to learn how to sing is to study "monuments of its own magnificence." Therefore, the speaker has "sailed the seas and come / To the holy city of Byzantium." The speaker addresses the sages "standing in God's holy fire / As in the gold mosaic of a wall," and asks them to be his soul's "singing-masters." He hopes they will consume his heart away, for his heart "knows not what it is"--it is "sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal," and the speaker wishes to be gathered "Into the artifice of eternity." The speaker says that once he has been taken out of the natural world, he will no longer take his "bodily form" from any "natural thing," but rather will fashion himself as a singing bird made of hammered gold, such as Grecian goldsmiths make "To keep a drowsy Emperor awake," or set upon a tree of gold "to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Or what is past, or passing, or to come." Form The four eight-line stanzas of "Sailing to Byzantium" take a very old verse form: they are metered in iambic pentameter, and rhymed ABABABCC, two trios of alternating rhyme followed by a couplet. Commentary "Sailing to Byzantium" is one of Yeats's most inspired works, and one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. Written in 1926 and included in Yeats's greatest single collection, 1928's The Tower, "Sailing to Byzantium" is Yeats's definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is "fastened to a dying animal" (the body). Yeats's solution is to leave the country of the young and travel to Byzantium, where the sages in the city's famous gold mosaics (completed mainly during the sixth and seventh centuries) could become the "singing-masters" of his soul. He hopes the sages will appear in fire and take him away from his body into an existence outside time, where, like a great work of art, he could exist in "the artifice of eternity." In the astonishing final stanza of the poem, he declares that once he is out of his body he will never again appear in the form of a natural thing; rather, he will become a golden bird, sitting on a golden tree, singing of the past ("what is past"), the present (that which is "passing"), and the future (that which is "to come"). A fascination with the artificial as superior to the natural is one of Yeats's most prevalent themes. In a much earlier poem, 1899's "The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart," the speaker expresses a longing to re-make the world "in a casket of gold" and thereby eliminate its ugliness and imperfection. Later, in 191 "Sailing to Byzantium" is an endlessly interpretable poem, and suggests endlessly fascinating comparisons with other important poems--poems of travel, poems of age, poems of nature, poems featuring birds as symbols. (One of the most interesting is surely Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," to which this poem is in many ways a rebuttal: Keats writes of his nightingale, "Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down"; Yeats, in the first stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium," refers to "birds in the trees" as "those dying generations.") It is important to note that the poem is not autobiographical; Yeats did not travel to Byzantium (which was renamed Constantinople in the fourth century A.D., and later renamed Istanbul), but he did argue that, in the sixth century, it offered the ideal environment for the artist. The poem is about an imaginative journey, not an actual one. 4.Byzantium" Summary At night in the city of Byzantium, "The unpurged images of day recede." The drunken soldiers of the Emperor are asleep, and the song of night-walkers fades after the great cathedral gong. The "starlit" or "moonlit dome," the speaker says, disdains all that is human--"All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins." The speaker says that before him floats an image--a man or a shade, but more a shade than a man, and still more simply "an image." The speaker hails this "superhuman" image, calling it "death-in-life and life-in-death." A golden bird sits on a golden tree, which the speaker says is a "miracle"; it sings aloud, and scorns the "common bird or petal / And all complexities of mire or blood." At midnight, the speaker says, the images of flames flit across the Emperor's pavement, though they are not fed by wood or steel, nor disturbed by storms. Here, "blood-begotten spirits come," and die "into a dance, / An agony of trance, / An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve," leaving behind all the complexities and furies of life. Riding the backs of dolphins, spirit after spirit arrives, the flood broken on "the golden smithies of the Emperor." The marbles of the dancing floor break the "bitter furies of complexity," the storms of images that beget more images, "That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea." Form The pronounced differences in "Byzantium"'s line lengths make its stanzas appear very haphazard; however, they are ac Commentary We have read Yeats's account of "Sailing to Byzantium"; now he has arrived at the city itself, and is able to describe it. In "Sailing to Byzantium" the speaker stated his desire to be "out of nature" and to assume the form of a golden bird; in "Byzantium," the bird appears, and scores of dead spirits arrive on the backs of dolphins, to be forged into "the artifice of eternity"--ghostlike images with no physical presence ("a flame that cannot singe a sleeve"). The narrative and imagistic arrangement of this poem is highly ambiguous and complicated; it is unclear whether Yeats intends the poem to be a register of symbols or an actual mythological statement. (In classical mythology, dolphins often carry the dead to their final resting-place.) In any event, we see here the same preference for the artificial above the actual that appeared in "Sailing to Byzantium"; only now the speaker has encountered actual creatures that exist "in the artifice of eternity"--most notably the golden bird of stanza three. But the preference is now tinged with ambiguity: the bird looks down upon "common bird or petal," but it does so not out of existential necessity, but rather because it has been coerced into doing so, as it were--"by the moon embittered." The speaker's demonstrated preoccupation with "fresh images" has led some critics to conclude that the poem is really an allegory of the process by which fantasies are rendered into art, images arriving from the "dolphin-torn, the gong-tormented sea," then being made into permanent artifacts by "the golden smithies of the Emperor." It is impossible to say whether this is all or part of Yeats's intention, and it is difficult to see how the prevalent symbols of the afterlife connect thematically to the topic of images (how could images be dead?). For all its difficulty and almost unfixed quality of meaning--the poem is difficult to place even within the context of A Vision--the intriguing imagery and sensual language of the poem are tokens of its power; simply as the evocation of a fascinating imaginary scene, "Byzantium" is unmatched in all of Yeats. Study Questions 1 One of the important themes in Yeats's writing is his exploration of the relationship between the natural and the artificial, and particularly the relationship between nature and art. With particular reference to the two Byzantium poems, describe how Yeats characterizes this relationship. Does he prefer the natural to art, or art to nature? Answer for Study Question #1Because the artificial is permanent, unfading, impervious to decay, beautiful, and free of the tr 2Some of Yeats's least accessible poems are his works of visionary history, which often incorporate themes from A Vision and seem, on the surface, thematically irrelevant to contemporary readers. How can these poems best be understood--in other words, should they be read today strictly for their magnificent language, or is there a way in which they embrace more universal elements of human experience than their occult, mythological frame of reference might imply? (Think especially about "Leda and the Swan" and "The Second Coming.") Answer for Study Question #2The language of "Leda" and "The Second Coming" is certainly magnificent, but the poems' themes are also quite powerful, and remain relevant to the experience of contemporary readers. Putting aside all the mystical jargon from A Vision, "The Second Coming" is a brilliant evocation of chaos and primal energy, and of a kind of eerie premonition: the sphinx "slouching toward Bethlehem" can be interpreted in many ways besides that which Yeats described. And "Leda" is a wonderful document of a violent encounter with the incomprehensible, the alien, the overwhelming, and of a turning point after which nothing will ever be the same. 3If you have read John Keats's great "Ode to a Nightingale," compare it to Yeats's equally great "Sailing to Byzantium." In what ways does the Yeats poem seem designed to refute the Keats poem? How does the singing golden bird differ from Keats's singing nightingale? Answer for Study Question #3Our first clue that the Yeats poem may be related to the earlier Keats poem occurs in the first stanza, when the speaker calls the birds singing in the trees "dying generations," a phrase quite similar to one in Keats's ode--"Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! / No hungry generations tread thee down." From that moment on, the poems are as thematically opposite as is possible for two poems glorifying art. Keats's nightingale (a natural bird) is a symbol of lyric fluidity, expressiveness, change, and union with nature; around the nightingale, Keats thinks that it would be "sweet to die" and "to cease upon the midnight with no pain." Yeats's golden bird (an artificial bird) is a symbol of permanence, knowledge, unchangeability, and a liberating separation from nature; Yeats longs to be "gathered into the artifice of eternity" precisely because he does not wish to age and to die 4"Adam's Curse" is one Compare and contrast "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," a very early poem by Yeats, with "The Circus Animals' Desertion," written not long before he died. What, if anything, do these poems have in common? How are they different? What does each poem say about the human heart, and how does the difference between those statements indicate Yeats's development as a poet? "The Irish Airman foresees his Death" is a good example of the way in which Yeats combines the political with the personal and the mystical. How does the airman's involvement in World War I relate to his "lonely impulse of delight," and what does the "lonely impulse of delight" say about his understanding of the war? What does the poem itself seem to say about the war? Yeats's style is quite unique among both nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets. What characterizes his poetic style? What kind of consciousness seems to be indicated by his rough meters, half-rhymes, and frequent violations of formal constraints? How do these traits affect, enhance, or interfere with his aesthetic articulation of his themes?