W.B. Yeats

Welcome to StudyClicks Explains, where we provide audio notes and analysis on junior cycle and leaving some topics to get you those top marks. We make exams easier. Hi everyone and welcome to this StudyClicks Explains podcast on W8 and its poetry. My name is Peter Tobin, I am an English teacher and I've also got a YouTube channel with lots of other leaving sort of content so feel free to check it out. Now Yates can often be a bit intimidating for students, especially students doing the leaving search because he's often seen as the quintessential Irish poet. Even if you haven't studied his poetry you definitely won't have heard of him in passing at least. His name and his fame have permeated most aspects of Irish culture. Every time there's a poll on Ireland's favourite poem or Ireland's favourite poet he's always right up there at the top. It's even been said by some that there is no modern Ireland without Yates. Now Yates is a great port to study for the leaving search because there is so much to look at. There's probably too much to cover for the leaving search alone but he was such a fascinating character and of course a really good poet as well. He changed his career both in terms of his poetic style but also his beliefs and interests. He lived in both Ireland and England as well as elsewhere throughout his life and he became a figurehead for Irish freedom from British rule while having very conflictive views about Irish people themselves. He was fascinated by mysticism and the occult for most of his life and he was an act of part of more than one secret society so there's loads there for us to get our teeth into. In the first part of this podcast we're going to look at the man himself, some context and biographical details before looking more closely at each of his poems on the leaving search syllabus. Throughout I'll draw your attention to important details as well as elements of his poetic style that reappear in his work. Let's start by taking a rough timeline of his life. Yates was born in Sandiemont Dublin in the year 1865 into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family. While not particularly wealthy, being Anglo-Irish and Protestant they saw themselves differently to other Irish people, particularly Irish Catholics. Throughout his life Yates himself made a clear distinction between the uneducated Irish peasantry, Hume champion and celebrated, and the educated Catholic middle classes Hume despised. Yates's father John Butler Yates was a portrait painter while his mother Susan came from the products from family in Sleigel, a wealthy family of merchants. Yates's father didn't have much time for formal schooling and encouraged his children's creativity whenever and however he could. Throughout his life Yates's father was a great supporter of his son's work. It was thanks to his father too in a roundabout way that Yates developed a love of the Irish countryside, especially of Sleigel where we find Ben Bolben which appears in a number of his poems as well as in his epitaph. Having moved his family to London to establish his reputation as an artist, Yates's father John realized that the financial position he provided for his young family was too precarious and Susan Yates's mother took William and his younger siblings home to Sleigel for a part of each year. John B. Yates preferred to remain in London during these extended visits. Eventually in 1881 John B. Yates returned to the family to Dublin permanently where William attends high school with a view to attending Trinity College like his father and grandfather did before him. His results however weren't good enough and instead he found himself going to art college, specifically the Metropolitan Art School. Here he encountered some interesting figures such as George Russell and his interest in Theosophy and the Occult began at that point. Yates had begun writing poetry as a child and he continued into his teenage years. He was encouraged in this by his father who said William must learn to believe in art and poetry and the sovereignty of the intellect and spirit. Much of his poetry from the early years is pastoral it's all to do with nature and the countryside and it also deals with idealised visions of love and beauty. In reality it all feels a bit Victorian, a small bit all-fashioned and it's thought by a lot of the critics to be lacking in an overall theme. Shortly after art college, Yates met John O'Leary. O'Leary was a crucial figure for Yates and Yates himself admits that it was through the all-fhenian leader John O'Leary I found my theme and that theme was Ireland itself. So John O'Leary was an Irish separatist who was an active part of the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an organisation that Yates himself joined and also he played a key role in the production of the organisation's newspaper The Irish People. O'Leary had recently returned to Ireland having been imprisoned in England for his IRB activities and at the time that he met Yates he was at the centre of a sort of literary circle in Dublin that was also promoting Irish nationalism through literature. Both Yates and O'Leary were drawn to one another and there was a relationship that lasted until O'Leary's death in 1907. He of course appears in Yates' bitter attack on a certain type of Irishness in the poem September 1913, romantic Ireland's dead and gone as with O'Leary in the grave. O'Leary had hopes that Yates' poetry would act almost like propaganda for the cause of Irish nationalism and they often had disagreements about Yates' belief in mysticism and the occult. When O'Leary sent him a note, dismissing some of the things that Yates was interested in out of a worry that it would affect how he was viewed in Ireland, Yates writes the following back to him. Now as to magic, it is absurd to hold me weak or otherwise because I chose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately to make next to my poetry the most important pursuit of my life. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write. So we can see that O'Leary sparked Yates' interest in Ireland and Irish nationalism but there was another figure who kept that flame burning and that was the infamous Mord Gun. At the time that Yates met Mord Gun, he had returned to England with his family, his father once again trying to make a reputation for himself and London as an artist. It was 1887, Yates was 22 and he was struggling to acclimatise to London after his years in Ireland. In his letters from that time he writes that "London is just as dull and dirty as my memory of it" and "you can't go five paces without seeing some wretched object broken either by wealth or poverty." Yates' sexuality is also of interest at this time. He was heterosexual, very much interested in women but entirely unfamiliar with them and unable to progress any relationship he was in. Some biographers of Yates note that he was able to keep the friendship of many women and to quote one of those biographers, Frank Tuhi, "this was because he was seen as different and not dangerous" and that his "inexperience made him unattractive to women." This was to be complicated by the impending meeting with Mord Gun which happened around this time. Something else that became a parent to Yates during this spell in London was also the benefits of his Irish connection to a writer living in London. He began to collect myths, stories and folklore and also to set up the Irish literary societies in Dublin and London. This was part of the Irish literary revival. There were other movements at the time such as the G.A. and the Gaelic League and the relationship between each of these movements wasn't always friendly and often this came down to the use of the Irish language. Yates never learned Irish and like many writers from the Anglo-Irish ascendancy he did not think it was useful. Instead he collected and wrote stories about ancient Ireland which he published in a book called the Celtic Twilight in 1893. Yates met Mord Gun in London in 1889. She had travelled to his home to deliver a letter from John O'Leary. Afterwards Yates said, "I was 23 when the troubling of my life began," referring to Mord Gun, and "I had never thought to see an a living woman so great beauty." Over the years he wrote many poems directly about her, numbering in the dozens, but there are also many smaller references to her in other poems as we'll see when we look at his work in detail. Like Yates, Mord Gun is sometimes a difficult figure to categorise and it's useful to look at them together. Yates was madly in love with her, but she refused to marry him. Her nationalism and her hatred of England and the English certainly played a part in Yates' own nationalism, but they are both unlikely revolutionaries. Again, Yates' biographer Frank Tuhi says, "She, the daughter of an English Colonel, he, the sion, or offspring, of generations of middle-class Protestants are receiving justification at the feet of John O'Leary, the pure source of fiendianism." Tuhi also goes on to say that Mord Gun had no real interest in literature, while eventually Yates betrayed them both, both Mord Gun and John O'Leary, by abandoning nationalist propaganda and in Gun's opinion, joining the side of the enemy. Before that eventual betrayal, as Mord Gun would have it, he wrote plays for her to star in, as part of the establishment of the Irish Literary Theatre and later the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. There's something impossibly romantic about both Gun and Yates. She, the committed revolutionary, determined to sacrifice her own happiness, security and life for her ideals. He, the dreamer, poor, both invented for themselves an idea of Ireland. Many critics have noted that Yates' idealized version of Ireland simply did not exist. In his early poetry and life, he celebrated the Irish peasant as some sort of gateway creature to the fairy world that he hoped to see. He wanted to root a new Ireland in the myths and stories of the past, one that was distinct and unique. The up and coming Catholic middle classes of the early 20th century were despised by him. He felt that education on those sorts of people was simply wasted. Later, Yates drifts away from organized political life, distrusting the idea of the need for sacrifice to achieve one's aims. He was also in a precarious position as an Anglo-Irish Protestant. The new Ireland, that he was committed to establishing wood, post-independence, threatened the very existence of his Anglo-Irish identity. Another woman in his life, Lady Gregory, at Coulpeg Park in County Gourway, helped him in many ways, not least in developing and appreciating his Anglo-Irish heritage. At Coulpeg, where he visited for the rest of Lady Gregory's life, he learned to love the Irish country house, and in many ways he learned to love his own Anglo-Irish Protestant cultural capital. Yates' interest in mysticism, the occult in symbolism, stems, according to critics, from his father's atheism. With Christianity so undermined for him, the young Yates gravitated towards secret societies that promised deeper understanding of the world around him. He was an active member of one such society called the Golden Dawn in London, and he took an oath to keep the organisation's secrets safe. There were many influences on Yates that contributed to him coming up with his own system of science and symbols, as well as his own understanding of human history. It's not crucial to the enjoyment of Yates' work, but it can be beneficial to the understanding of some of his poetry, so we look at it briefly here. Yates saw all of human history, both individual, personal, and shared, as going in cycles. He explained this idea of cycles by using a cone shape. By an upside-down ice cream cone. Imagine that it is revolving, turning around. This is how Yates envisions the passage of time. At the top end, it is pointed, while at the other end, it is wide. The wide end represents the world we are familiar with, the universe we inhabit, while the pointed end at the top, you have the spiritual summit. For example, in his poem "Sailing to Byzantium," Yates called on the sages, the Ys, to unwind them serves and rotate down from the top point of the cone to the ordinary or material universe below. Yates pushes this symbolism further, by sometimes referring to two interlocking cones, which represents things that are in conflict or opposition to one another. The poetry that Yates writes in his later years is full of symbols, and images that stem from his beliefs, but also from human history. There are more that are entirely personal to him, so unlike shared symbols or images, they are very difficult to decipher without notes and help from the poem himself. When Yates was 50 years old, he married George, she produced automatic writing for him, and his later years were a total rejection of the state, the ideas behind it, and his leaning towards fascism. His later poems are full of him and vigor in sexual energy. He was certainly different to what the Irish traditional conservators would have appreciated. The last years of his life are marked by a number of changes. His poetry becomes even less ornate in flurry, more precise, and at times vicious. His political outlook two changes. In 1922, Yates first appointed to the senate and he spent six years as a senator. In that time, he railed against the conservators and the Catholic Church, as well as confronting them on issues such as divorce. Perhaps questioning the efficiency of democracy, Yates gravitates towards more authoritarian methods of governance in the 1930s and shows an interest in fascism, even writing marching songs for the blue shirts and Irish fascist group. Yates finally used a time of sexual adventure for him. When he was 69, he had an operation performed, a type of early vasectomy that he said restored him to his former vigor. He was in some ways making up for the last time of his youth and he found that sexual adventure was conducive to his productivity as a port. He was a prolific writer until the very end of his life in 1939. He died at the hotel, Idale, Sejure, in mental in France on the 28th of January 1939 age 73. He was buried after a discreet and private funeral at Rockbroon Capemarta. According to his wife George, his actual words were "if I die, bury me up there" at Rockbroon and then in a year's time when the newspaper took forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in slighol. In the end, there was some controversy because as local customs in French Graviards, Yates' remains had been dug up and mixed with other remains so they couldn't be entirely sure that the remains that were sent back to Ireland in 1948 for a rubereal were actually Yates. Whoever it was, that was buried at Dromcliffe in slighol and the epitaph on his gravestone is, as he intended, the final lines from one of his last poems under Ben Bulgum. Cast a cold eye on life on death, horsemen pass by. If you are serious about your exams, StudyClick's premium is the best way to study. You'll get access to every exam question by topic, American schemes and solutions, plus exclusive mock exam questions and papers. No more scrambling for the right questions, just structured exam ready prep. And for podcast listeners, here's ten euro off with this cold podcast ten at checkout. Go to studyclickstartie and get your upgrade today. Now let's take a look at some of Yates' poems on the Leabingsert syllabus in a bit more detail. The Lake Isle of Inish Free is the earliest poem in the selection for the Leabingsert and it's probably one of Yates' most famous poems. It's language and its meaning is quite simple. The speaker wishes to escape from the city, an urban environment, to the natural world of the Lake Isle of Inish Free, a rural one. Yates has said that the inspiration for this poem came when he was living in London. One day while walking he heard the sound of a fountain coming from inside a sharp window. It made him long for the sound of the lake water lapping on the shore and it transports him from the grey pavements of London to the natural world of Inish Free. This poem is a great example of how Yates uses nature symbolically. Inish Free symbolises escape. It's an idealised, almost utopian world that is waiting for him in Ireland. Even the name includes the word free hinting at the freedom he associates with nature and the Irish countryside. The opening lines are solemn and like an incantation, I will arise and go now. This isn't some holiday destination he wants to escape to for a week or two. It's something much deeper, all-encompassing. It's a way of life. The imagery used in the poem is not specific. There are mentions of a cabin and bean rolls but not incredibly detailed descriptions. Yates is using the description to contribute to a dreamlike quality, like he's travelling to this place in his mind while still on the pavements grey in London. One of the most important things about the technique in this poem however is the use of sound. It's used to control the speed at which we read but also to mimic the sounds of nature. The poem is written in quattrain, four line stanzas, with a clearly established rhyme scheme, A B A B. The first three lines in each stanza are longer than the fourth which is slower. This helps to slow down the sense of movement in the poem much like the water lapping on the shore. Yates also works with patterns of sound, a mixture of vowels and consonants, light and short stresses and long slow ones. The next poem that we look at is September 1913. The late Gile of Inish free is from Yates's early period, while the rest of his poetry on the Levensturk Silvis comes from after 1900. There was a marked change in his style from the pastoral, almost old fashioned Victorian style, to something much more paired back and direct. September 1913 is an example of that. You could say that it is a type of public poetry, or poetry including public commentary. The background to the poem was based on a very public issue indeed, one that was dividing certain elements of Dublin society and the poem 1913 itself was published in the Irish Times, so he was definitely writing it with a specific audience in mind. The controversy was about the Hulein art collection. Hulein was the nephew of Yates' good friend Lady Gregory and he offered his collection of paintings to the city of Dublin. The only condition was that a gallery be built to house them. Dublin Corporation resisted the plans as they were expected to fund the building of the gallery and also the idea was objected to by many ordinary Dubliners on the grounds that the money could be better spent elsewhere, but also that some of the paintings, modernist impressionist works, were obscene. Yates was angry that the city of Dublin would reject the chance to have a modern art collection, but he also sent some sectarianism that the collection was refused because Hulein was a Protestant. The poem on one level is a rejection of a certain view of Ireland. Yates is attacking the narrow-mindedness of the Catholic Middle Fathers and the priority that they place on commerce and religion. He says, "Men were born to pray and save in a really sarcastic way." Indeed, the tone throughout is bitterly ironic. Yates' desire is an Ireland that values culture, celebrates its folk roots and champions the arts, as well as respects the sacrifices that were made by heroes of the past. This poem shows that he believes modern Ireland does none of those things. While there is some imagery at work in the poem, specifically the hands, fumbling in the greasy till and the wild geese spreading their wings, it's a poem that communicates its message and is driven by rhetorical questions and plain language. There is nothing difficult in the language of the poem, it's stating facts from Yates' view and asking questions. There are four eight-line stanzas, rhyming A, B, A, B, C, D, C, D, and each stanza ends with either the same refrain or a variation on it, romantic Ireland's dead and garnets with Olyrie in the grave. The use of the refrain gives an answer to the questions that he's asking, what need you, what could they save, was it for this? The repetition of the phrase is effective too and makes the variation of the refrain at the very end even more powerful, but let them be their dead and garnet their with Olyrie in the grave. The poems of Yates' on the leaving syllabus are a mix of public commentary and private reflection. Yates was a poet who reflects often on himself, his own situation, as well as how his current situation, for example, aging, isolation, creativity, connected to universal themes and ideas, that could be applicable to everyone. A poem that highlights this approach is The Wild Swans at Cool. This poem explores the ideas of passing time and the impact that it has on the speaker. It's done through creating a central contrast between the aging poet and the ageless swans. The first two stanzas establishes are set to the scene. It is an autumn evening in the woods at the edge of a lake. On the lake are 59 swans. The counting of the swans reminds him that 19 years previous, when he first counted the swans, he was a different man, an entirely different person. Back then he trotted with a lighter tread, implying that perhaps he was happier or at least more carefree. Now he says his heart is sore, perhaps at realizing how much he and his life have changed over the intervening years. The swans become symbols for all that he feels he has lost and may yet lose. In the last stanzas, he imagines what he will feel or where the swans will go when he wakes up to find that they have gone. He could be here talking about his creativity, his ability as a poet. What would he be if that left him? In terms of technique, the wild swans at Cool is rich in symbolism and imagery. The autumn evening hints at the fact that the poet sees himself as being in the autumn of his life, and the swans, companionable and in pairs, are a stark contrast to yates as he was at the time, unmarried, isolated and lonely. The poem is written in six line stanzas, rhyming A, B, C, B, D, D. There are alternating tetrometer lines which are lines with four beats, and trometer lines which are lines that have three beats. There is some use of sound here, the literary phrase "bellbeat" of their wings above my head, but this poem mostly makes use of the clear imagery to communicate its strength of feeling. It's a personal reflection on his own situation, but one that is relatable in universal too. Another of yates's public poems is Eastern 1916. This poem obviously references one of the keystone events in Irish history, the 1916 Rising. The Rising was a rebellion against British rule in Ireland by a small number of Republicans. At first there was very little support for it, and even yates himself, the avowed nationalist, disapproved, but as the British government began carrying out executions on the supposed leaders of the rebellion, public sentiment shifted, and those executed were celebrated as heroes. Yates himself admitted that he was greatly moved by the events of the rising, although his conflicted feelings are still there to be seen in the poem that he created. There is a contrast between the ideas expressed in September 1913 and Eastern 1916. In September 1913, Yates laments the fact that romantic Ireland is dead and gone. It's with Olyria and the grave, but here in Eastern 1916, in the first stanza, he recognises that those people who seemed like actors in some sort of drama, the ones that he and others used to mock in private, have now become heroes of the sort that he celebrated in his other poem, September 1913. There is a similar use of refrain. All's change changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born. He goes on to detail those involved in the Rising, and very graciously, even speaking favourably of those he disliked, particularly Major German-Bride Mordgann's husband. He acknowledges the true impact of the actions of the rebel leaders. They have transformed both themselves and Ireland. Yates, as he does in many of his poems, also generalises from the specific here being dester rising to the general. He muses how sacrifice and commitment can make a stone of the heart, and ever-changing life runs like a stream around and over it, but he also concedes that the stone is part of it. It's in the midst of it all. There's a sort of reference here to those that he thinks have been spoiled by their commitment to a certain type of nationalism. In particular, Mordgann and Constance Markiewicz, but there are others. The last part of the poem details Yates' concerns in more detail. His conflicted feelings around the violence and the intention of the Rising. It is full of questions emphasising his uncertainty. Despite this, he lists the names of some of those involved and says that they would be celebrated wherever Green is born. They themselves have changed, not just Ireland, and the terrible beauty applies equally to them as to the future of Ireland after the Rising. All of this is delivered in short, trimeter lines. There are some metaphor and symbolic language, particularly around the idea of stones, hearts and streams, but we also have the idea of the Christian symbol of Easter and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The self-sacrifice of the rebel leaders in 1916 is linked by Yates to the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Like with some of his other poems, Yates also makes use of the tone of the poem to communicate meaning. The poem is a public poem about a serious event, and the use of the refrain, "All's change changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born," is particularly effective in creating a sense of formality. Also, the listing of names is very effective, with the help of the trimeter lines that creates a steady rhythm that formalises the content. In some ways, Yates is trying to separate his own feelings about the Rising from what he details in the poem. Although we do see some of his own personal thoughts and feelings, he works hard to make it a public poem of universal themes linked to a single event. Yates also tries to identify universal insight or themes from a specific event in the next poem that we're going to look at. An Irish Ironman for Seize's death. This poem was written in response to the death of Major Robert Gregory, the son of Yates' friend, Lady Gregory of Kool Park. While it is written in response to that event, it is a more general poem trying to get at universal ideas rather than a poem about Robert Gregory. It's specifically called an Irishman, as opposed to the Irishman or even to naming Robert Gregory, as one might expect if it was an elegy. This poem raises questions and explores ideas around sacrifice, war, the individual, society and motivation. The poem is written in the first person, the eye of the poem being an Irish Ironman. The Ironman knows that he will die in the clouds above. He accepts that fate, but says that it is not for his country or even his community that he fights, nor is it because he hates the enemy. It is simply a sudden impulse. The consideration of life and death and the realization that it's worth doing something rather than nothing. That is what has driven him to this tumult in the clouds. Now this might appear selfish. What about his family and his loved ones? Do they have any say in him signing up to his death? But there's an interesting parallel here with how Yates' art and the life of an artist. And Robert Gregory was an artist, so there is definitely a strong parallel. An artist should be willing to forego friendships, luxuries and comfort in creating the earth. An artist should be willing to forego friendships, luxuries and comfort in creating their art. Yates often did himself in his life as a poet. So this poem, prompted by Gregory's death, is about something bigger. The purpose of life maybe are the balance of life and death and the role of the artist. All of this is succinctly communicated in plain, unadorned language. The most technical aspect of this poem is the balance that is achieved through counterpointing both the ideas of life and death, duty and responsibility, as well as those regular tetrometer lines. There is a sense of control and mastery in the poem that makes the speaker's decision to join the war seem less impulsive and actually a carefully considered one. The next poem that we're going to look at is "Sailing to Byzantium". This poem comes from one of Yates' later collections and it shows the poets' concerns with aging and the art of poetry itself. The poem begins with a fairly direct statement. That is no country for all men. Although it is not stated and that adds to the universality of his work, we can assume that the country is Ireland. There are lots of images in the first stanza that we would associate with fertility and youth, the salmon falls, the macrocreditsies. So this place, this country, is for young people, not for the old, like Yates. Also, in this country, people are caught, are so caught up in the pleasures of youth, that sensual music, that they don't have time for the intellectual side of things, and that, at his age now, is what Yates desires. In stanza 2, the speaker says, "And therefore I have sailed the seas and come to the holy city of Byzantium." For the speaker and Yates, the soul must be active. The intellectual life must be active. It's not enough to simply be caught up in the rushes of youthful existence, and for this reason, he wishes to sail to Byzantium for all that that place represents cultural excellence and advanced civilization, celebration of art and artists. At the end of the poem, we see that what the speaker really wants is to cast off their body and be part of the artifice of eternity. Essentially, he's looking to live forever, eternal life through art. He chooses the shape of a golden bird and determines to sing about what is past or passing or to come. He is encapsulating the role of the poet or artist here to reflect in art what is happening in the world, both in the past and the present, and crucially, as Yates believed that existence went in cycles, also what is in the future. The craftsmanship that Yates so admire in the Byzantine Empire is reflected somewhat in the crafting of the poem itself. There is a very strict structure with an A-B-A-B-A-B-C-C rhyme scheme, and each stanza ends with a rhyming couplet. He uses the Iambic pentameter, and we also see examples of Sazura and Enjamment being used. Similar to some of Yates's earlier poems on the course, we see him make use of consonants in order to create tone through sound. There is the use of hired consonants like P, T and C, for example the word "pultry" and a "tattered coat upon a stick". The use of consonants here works to communicate the speakers feelings about his impression of old age. This poem is prompted in some senses by a crisis of identity surrounding aging. Another of Yates's poems that is prompted by crisis is the Second Coming, although the crisis that precipitates that poem is the First World War. The Second Coming explores some of Yates's personal beliefs and his theory or vision of the world. The poem is written shortly after the end of the First World War at a time when there had been revolution in Russia and the beginning of a war of independence in Ireland. The first stanza of the poem reflects that lack of control or the influence of Anarchy. The Falconer loses control of his Falcon. Things fall apart. Mere Anarchy is loose upon the world. War and destruction is creating a blood-dimmed tide. The last two lines of stanza one, the best lack of all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity, has echoes of Yates' views around passionate commitment to an ideal, suggesting that it is those of us with the worst ideas, maybe those who lead to bloodshed and violence, that are the most passionate and committed. The second stanza shifts in tone and approach. It focuses on the idea of the Second Coming, an idea that is associated usually with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ as detailed in the book of Revelation in the Bible. That Jesus will return to earth after some disaster or period of devastation and it will be the end of the world. That event, according to the Bible, will be signaled by certain signs such as the Forer Horsemen of the Apocalypse as well as a variety of misshapen and deformed beasts. In this stanza then, the speaker says the words, the Second Coming, and almost immediately something troubles his sight. In the distance, deliberately indistinct, is a creature, a shape with the body of a lion and the head of a man, slowly dragging itself through the desert sand towards Bethlehem. This is quite a horrific image when you really examine it. Yates is suggesting that the Second Coming so close in fact that he can see in the distance the Harbinger of Judgment Day. As with some of Yates' other poems, there is a level of understanding we can achieve without understanding his system of symbols and beliefs that underpin it. This poem has a power and beauty in what it describes and the ideas that communicates, but we can get a further understanding when we consider Yates' beliefs in two thousand year cycles of history as well, as the gyres mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. The Roth Beast that is being born is heraling a new beginning, a new two thousand year cycle, and it's not one that the speaker is particularly hopeful about. Similarly, another poem that is prompted by the Violence Chaos and Disorder around the port is From Meditations in Time of Civil War. Six, the stairs nest by my window. This poem is part of a series of poems Yates wrote about his observations on the Irish Civil War. This poem is interesting as it's written from Yates' perspective in his terror in Balleli in County Galway. Here he is able to observe nature and he is trying to contrast the violence and destruction in the world of men with the constructive beauty of nature. Yates returns again and again via the refrain at the end of each stanza and the imagery to the central image of honeybees building an nest. The poem expresses hope. Yates himself said that the poem stem from a desire to have hope and not grow embittered or to lose the sense of beauty of nature. Even in a crumbling wall, the loosening masonry, there is room for honeybees to build. There is of course room in the poem for Yates to question the behaviour and passions of those involved in the war. He wonders about what has led people to this point. Their hearts grow and brutally against each other and we're reminded of his thoughts in Easter 1916 and how sacrifice in dedication to a cause can harden or make a stone of the heart. The refrain, the final line in each stanza, offers hope and the fact that the poem ends on this line too is significant. This is, ultimately, a poem of hope. There's an irony that runs through much of Yates' work, surrounding the fact that he was a committed nationalist but the realisation of that goal, an independent Ireland, would have put his own position as a member of the Anglo Irish ascendancy in real risk. We mentioned it at the beginning of the podcast and we've seen it in some of the poems. We see it in his attacks on the petty nature of the Catholic middle class in September 1913. We also see it in some of the speeches that he made as a senator in his later life. In one speech in particular, arguing against the imposition of the divorce law, he famously refers to the Anglo Irish Protestant community as "no petty people". As he grew older and spent more time in the homes of his Anglo Irish friends, such as Lady Gregory at Coul Park and the Goura Booth sisters at Lysa Del, he began to go very fond of the lifestyle of the ascendancy, large country houses, as well as the cultural capital that came with being a member of that community. In his poem, "In memory of Eva Goura Booth and Con Marquis Riche, Yates explores the idea of time, like he does in the world's ones at Coul, but also the idea of the legacy of the Anglo Irish ascendancy class." In his nostalgia around it, he could also be signaling that its time may be at an end, as the Irish free state was coming into its own, having been established five years earlier. The first stands of the poem is structured as a memory of the house at Lysa Del, and the two sisters wearing kimonos. This quickly transitions into their later lives. Constance, the older sister, married a Polish man and became Con Marquis Riche. She fought in the Easter Rising of 1916. She was sentenced to death for her role in it, but it was commuted to life in prism because she was a woman. She was released very quickly in 1917, and after that she resumed her political activities. Yates describes her in this poem as "conspiring among the ignorant, and Eva, who worked with the poor, supported the trade union move and afforded for the rights of women and girls in London, as withered by her political convictions." So Yates sees both sisters as turning their backs on the Anglo-Arys' sentency class, and this has turned them from being beautiful to withered and aged creatures. The second stands adeaves with the passing of time, a regular concern of Yates, and how to fight against the passage of time, and how that fight is very often fruitless. He explores the idea of defeating time to restore these two sisters to their previous innocence and beauty. The idea of fire is significant as the burning of some of the large ascendancy properties, like Lissadelle and the House at Koolpark, happened around the country during the Civil War. All of this is communicated in two stanzas of Iambic Tetrameter rhyming ABBACDDC. It's often been said that this poem, although it's not a sonnet, as it is 32 lines rather than 14, does use some of the features of a sonnet, particularly the second stands that developing or exploring an idea are theme presented by the first. One of the most interesting technical aspects of this poem is that Yates uses the present tense to discuss past events, in a way, suspending the passing of time and keeping these things in the present, almost keeping them alive. The idea of the cultural capital of the Anger Irish class is intrinsically linked to another Yates poem, Swift's Epitaph. This poem, or six lines of it, is a loose translation of the epitaph that is carved in St. Pasha's Cathedral in Dublin. Yates was a huge admirer of Jonathan Swift, another member of the Anger Irish minority. They considered themselves Irish, but being Protestant, they weren't always considered truly Irish by the Catholic majority. Swift is synonymous with the idea of liberty. He once said that "all government, without the consent of the governed, is the very definition of slavery." But it's important to recognize the distinction between intellectual liberty and liberty for the masses. Just like Yates, Swift forges his own path and was not afraid to think for himself or write what he thought, also like Yates, he celebrated the freedom of artistic expression. Both Swift and Yates celebrate freedom, but not necessarily the freedom of everyone. Yates linked, as he saw it, the demise of the Irish Free State, with the rise of the Catholic middle classes. For him, Swift is the ultimate example to live up to. As we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, in his older age, Yates retreats from political life, perhaps disillusioned by what he saw. His poetry changes markedly over time, and an interesting contrast is to look at the earliest of his poems on the leaving St. Silbus, the lake I live in a tree, and one of his last poems, An Acre of Grass. In this poem, An Acre of Grass, Yates is close to the end of his life, and he knows it. He recognises that he is slowing down physically, and he could give into this temptation to be still. He has everything he needs, books, pictures, a single acre of grass on which to exercise. There is nothing more that he needs or wants, but the distinction between this poem and Lake I live in a tree is that here, in his advanced age, Yates yearns for some madness, some passion and energy. In Lake I live in a tree, he wanted peace and calm. He wanted the peace to come dropping slow. In An Acre of Grass, there is the use of the word frenzy twice in the poem. Yates draws comparisons between himself and particular people that maintain their art into their old age, William Blake, the poet and Michelangelo the artist. He says he must remake himself, like Lear and Timon, both characters from Shakespeare, old men who showed passion and energy, and a little madness, in the case of Lear in particular, into their old age. That sense of madness and frenzy is continued in another later poem. Politics is another one of his short poems, this one written in response to an American poet, Archibald McLeish, who said that Yates' poetry was good, but that he should have said more about politics. This poem then takes that as its title, but comes to a very different conclusion. It opens with the line, "How can I, that girl standing there, my attention fix on Roman or on Russian or on Spanish politics?" As we know, Yates was deeply involved in the political situation in Ireland for many years, but we get the sense that now, as an old man, he's disillusioned with it. He would much rather stare at that girl, or better yet, as he says in the final line, "Hold her in my arms." He acknowledges in the middle of the poem that there may well be some merit to what politicians say, and some value in knowing something about politics. But we are left under no illusion of what he thinks is more important. That girl, and potentially holding her in his arms, is much more important than anything that politics can say. The poem is humorous, but there's also a touch of melancholy there, taking into account Yates' age when he was writing it, when he says, "Oh, that I were young again." There's a sense of regret there, and that regret contrasts with the playful tone of the preceding lines. The final Yates poem on the leaving of Silivus was one of the very last ones that he wrote, perhaps even the last one he wrote. He intended it to be the opening poem to his last collection, to be published after his death, and in it he writes his own energy, as well as the epitaph that was to be inscribed on his gravestone. He left nothing to chance. We are going to look at two sections of that poem. The poem is under Ben Bolben, and we're going to be looking at Pirate 5 and 6. So the first part, Pirate 5, is a call to ports, almost like instructions that he's leaving to them for after his death. He calls on them to learn their trade and to sing, reminiscent of the singing schools in Salem's Byzantium. He urges them to focus on craft, whatever is well made. And perhaps here he might be having a dig at some of the modernist poetry that was at that time coming out of England and the US, and perhaps even some of the Irish poets that emerged after Irish independence. As well as being ignorant of their history, he accuses them of being "base-born" products of base beds. Essentially that they're the result of mixing between classes and nationalities. Yates was worried that true Irishness, that of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy and the peasantry with their folk traditions, certainly not the Catholic mid-flowsers. Yates was worried that that Irishness was disappearing because of mixing. At the same time, in Germany, the Nazis used the same idea, eugenics, to justify the Holocaust. Despite the unsaved aspect of that, the unsaved re-element of that, Yates goes on to say that Irish poets of that time should celebrate the true Irish, the ones that we've just mentioned, and remember the history of them and Ireland so that it can be celebrated in the future. There's a very select few that makes it into Yates' catalogue of Irishness to be remembered and celebrated. The last section, number six, is where Yates described his final resting place. He simply says, "Under Bear Ben Bulbens' head in Drumcliffe Churchyard, Yates is laid. He claims a connection to the place, an ancestor of his was Rector there, and his last words are the epitaph that was carved on his gravestone. Cast a cold eye on life, on death. Horseman passed by." I hope that you've enjoyed the study clicks podcast. For other Leabingsert materials and revision resources, please check out my YouTube channel, Mr. Tobin Leabesert English, to find some things that are useful for you there. 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