The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats was born on the 13th of June in 1865, in Sandymount, Country Dublin, Ireland. His family was extremely artistic. His father, John Butler Yeats, studied art at Heatherley’s Art School in London, his brother Jack became a well-renowned painter, and his sisters Elizabeth and Susan became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, which was the use of handmade objects and boycotting mechanical objects.

Yeats grew up as a member of the former Protestant Ascendancy, where the changes in Ireland directly disadvantaged him because of his heritage. During his childhood, he experienced political power shifting away from the Protestant Ascendancy, which had a major influence on his poems later on in his life. At the age of two, his family moved to England for his father to study art and become an artist. At first, he and his siblings were taught at home, where his mother entertained them with stories and folktales from Ireland. His father gave an education of only geography and chemistry and took William to natural history explorations.

On 26 January 1877, William Yeats entered the Godolphin primary school in Hammersmith where he would learn for four years, before his family moved back to Dublin. In 1881, Yeats continued his education at Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin, near his father’s studio. Yeats spent most of his time there, meeting the city’s artists and writers. It was during this time when he started to write poetry. During the years of 1884 and 1886, Yeats attended the Metropolitan School of Art, when in 1885 his poetry works and essay of “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson” were published in the Dublin University Review. Others of his works from this time include a play about a bishop, a monk and a woman ...

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...ows 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?

The poem begins with a description of multiple disastrous situations: the falcon, a metaphor for a person, cannot hear the falconer, God, which means that people cannot hear what God is saying, and that chaos and anarchy will uphold the government. The Second Coming is when Jesus or any other religious figure comes back to the world, and something major happens that changes the current way of life. In this case, a vision of a sphinx comes out of Spiritus Mundi (Spirit of the World) and goes towards Bethlehem, possibly saying that the Anti-Christ will return and spread the disastrous happenings throughout the world.