Use of Dramatic Contrast in Yeats' Poetry

726 Words2 Pages

Yeats' poetry is very dramatic because he usually creates dramatic contrasts within his poems and because his tone changes regularly. When he wasn't in conflict with the world around him he was in conflict with himself. He was never satisfied with modern Ireland, even when he was younger. As he grew older, his dissatisfaction became even greater.

Firstly he uses a sharp contrast in his tone. This is particularly evident in his poem 'September 1913'. He starts by attacking the greedy uncultured people of Ireland, especially the shopkeepers who “add the halfpence to the pence”. He uses adjectives such as “greasy” and “shivering” to help portray his feelings of disgust and vexation. This gives the stanza a reproachful tone. At the end of the stanza he introduces the refrain:

“Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,

It's with O'Leary in the grave”

This refrain enforces his disgust at the type of money hungry people that the Irish have become. In the third and fourth stanza, however, Yeats completely changes the tone of his poetry. He praises the romantics of Irish history, such as Rob...

Show More
Related

  • William Butler Yeats Research Paper

    1954 Words  | 4 Pages

    William Yeats is deliberated to be among the best bards in the 20th era. He was an Anglo-Irish protestant, the group that had control over the every life aspect of Ireland for almost the whole of the seventeenth era. Associates of this group deliberated themselves to be the English menfolk but sired in Ireland. However, Yeats was a loyal affirmer of his Irish ethnicity, and in all his deeds, he had to respect it. Even after living in America for almost fourteen years, he still had a home back in Ireland, and most of his poems maintained an Irish culture, legends and heroes. Therefore, Yeats gained a significant praise for writing some of the most exemplary poetry in modern history

    Read More

  • William Butler Yeats

    832 Words  | 2 Pages

    Yeats' early work was not especially Irish. Soon, however, he began to look to the ancient rituals and pagan beliefs of the land for his artistic inspiration. He tried to merge this interest with his aristocratic tastes to create an original Irish poetry and to establish his own identity.

    Read More

  • W.B. Yeats and History Essay

    1719 Words  | 4 Pages

    In regard to the Nationalists, he incorporates traditional Irish characters, such as Fergus and the Druids, to create an Irish mythology and thereby foster a national Irish identity. After the division of the Cultural Nationalists, Yeats feels left behind by the movement and disillusioned with their violent, "foolish" methods. He is also repeatedly rejected by Gonne. These efforts to instigate change through poetry both fail, bringing the function of the poet and his poetry into question. If these unfruitful poems tempt him from his ?craft of verse,?

    Read More

  • Cultural Criticism in W.B.Yeats’ An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

    1516 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...otism is established in a seemingly simple testament to a dead soldier.  What better way to honor the dead than to personify Lady Ireland through his character!  The passion that Yeats subconsciously incorporates into his poem equals that of his love for Ireland.  An Irish Airman Foresees His Death begins on a low and desperate note, but reaches its’ climax upon Gregory answering Ireland’s call, and ends by, essentially, posing a question to the reader.  ‘As a collective people, which side of the teeter-totter do we belong?’  He leaves his hero (Gregory) hanging in the balance of an important national question.  The poem may be about Yeats’ character foreseeing his death, but the fact remains: he is in the act of ‘foreseeing,’ he is not dead yet…and neither is Ireland.

    Read More

  • W. B. Yeats, George Hyde-Lees, and the Automatic Script

    2766 Words  | 6 Pages

    Finneran, Richard J. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. 2nd Ed. New York: Simon and Schuster Inc., 1996.

    Read More

  • William Butler Yeats and William Blake

    2712 Words  | 6 Pages

    It has been acknowledged by many scholars that Yeats' study of Blake greatly influenced his poetic expression. This gives rise to the widely held assertion that Yeats is indebted to Blake. While I concur with this assertion, I feel that the perhaps greater debt is Blake's.

    Read More

  • Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop by W.B. Yeats: Themes and Symbolism

    582 Words  | 2 Pages

    In “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” Yeats employs two themes, the theme of good versus evil, and the theme of sexuality. He conveys the theme of good versus evil through the Bishop’s statements in the first stanza, as well as J...

    Read More

  • Essay on themes in Things Fall Apart and Second Coming

    857 Words  | 2 Pages

    Yeats opens his poem with a doom-like statement. He states "Turning and turning in the widening gyre." This enhances the cyclic image that Yeats is trying to portray. Here, Y...

    Read More

  • Change Through Changelessness

    986 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...eme in his writing. Although the previous poems mentioned only represent a small fraction of Yeats’ writings, it is easy to see this repetitive idea. In When You Are Old the man’s love is never changing, however the woman’s realization of this is constantly wavering. Then in the poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree he wants to change his life from chaos to peace, and the lake never changes. Then in The Wild Swans at Coole the birds are always there, but the seasons change. The Second Coming also represents how mankind changes, but God’s principles are never-wavering. And lastly Sailing to Byzantium portrays how monuments never change, but what they mean to the viewers will always change. Yeats knew that this was something that future generations would also face, and therefore his poem will forever last in history but the importance of it is up to the future generations.

    Read More

  • Critical Analysis Of Yeat's The Second Coming

    735 Words  | 2 Pages

    As the poem can be interpreted in numerous ways, and therefore, its message has a flexibility that enables its readers to mould it’s meaning to befit them. Thus, allowing its messages to be applicable to anyone, regardless of demographic. For example, the poem can also be interpreted by Christians as man’s decaying interest of Christian ideologies and the supposed products of this decay. A view held by plenty of older Christians and a important view for Christian youth to acquire in order to cement their beliefs. Though the message conveyed by Yeats that can be applicable to all contemporary youth, is that depravity and tension arouses conflict. And when we look forward, we feel our anxiety stir at the inevitable - at the international conflict embedded in humanities future. Why will this conflict occur? Because if relations between ‘super-powers’ are withered now, how would it cope though overpopulation, the depletion of resources and other problems ever nation has to overcome? How can we be sure that these super-powers won’t value land, and resources such as oil over their populations in order to maintain their economic and political power? We don’t. This is why a third world war is indeed probable, and why this poem’s core message is still relevant to all

    Read More

  • W.B. Yeats' September 1913 and Easter 1916 Poem

    942 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem September 1913 focuses on the time where the Irish Independence was at its highest. Yeats repeats the phrase “romantic Ireland” a lot in this poem as it refers to the sacrifice of the materialistic things for independence and freedom. To further emphasize the importance and greatness of the revolution, Yeats pointed out the names of heroic individuals who gave their lives to fight for the cause. Yeats did not give any detail about the Irish heroes but he does state that “they have gone about the world like wind” (11). The heroes were so famous; their names could be heard and talked about all over the world. In this poem, Yeats does not go directly in to detail about the historical events that happened but fo...

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis Of William Butler Yeats's No Second Troy

    931 Words  | 2 Pages

    On the surface, William Butler Yeats’s poem No Second Troy, tells the narrative of a man questioning his unrequited loves morality and ideology. However, further reading of the poem gives the reader insight into Yeats’s own feelings towards Irish radical, Maud Gonne, a woman to whom he proposed on numerous occasions unsuccessfully. Gonne had always been more radical than Yeats within her efforts to secure Ireland’s independence from Britain in the first decades of the 20th century, but Yeats persisted in receiving her love, dedicating many of his poems to her, thus showing his obsession to the radical actress. The poem can be split into four rhetorical questions; first the speaker asks “why” he should blame her, for his own unhappiness; next he questions “what” else she could have done with her “noble” mind; following this, the speaker, seemingly speaking to himself, accepts that she is who she is and that cannot be changed, lastly the speaker questions whether there is anything else that could have been an outlet for her “fiery” temperament.

    Read More

  • Thomas Sterns Eliot and William Butler Yeats' Poetry

    1408 Words  | 3 Pages

    Yeats and Eliot are two chief modernist poet of the English Language. Both were Nobel Laureates. Both were critics of Literature and Culture expressing similar disquietude with Western civilization. Both, prompted by the Russian revolution perhaps, or the violence and horror of the First World War, pictured a Europe that was ailing, that was literally falling apart, devoid of the ontological sense of rational purpose that fuelled post-Enlightenment Europe and America(1). All these similar experience makes their poetry more valuable to compare and to contrast since their thoughts were similar yet one called himself Classicist(Eliot) who wrote objectively and the other considered himself "the last Romantic" because of his subjective writing and his interest in mysticism and the spiritual. For better understanding of these two poets it is necessary to mention some facts and backgrounds on them which influenced them to incorporate similar (to some extent) historical motif in their poetry.

    Read More

  • Symbolism and Symbols in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats

    1858 Words  | 4 Pages

    W. B. Yeats is one of the foremost poets in English literature even today. He was considered to be one of the most important symbolists of the 20th century. He was totally influenced by the French movement of the 19th century. He was a dreamer and visionary, who was fascinated by folk-lore, ballad and superstitions of the Irish peasantry. Yeats poems are fully conversant with the Irish background, the Irish mythologies etc. Yeats has tried to bring back the “simplicity” and “altogetherness” of the earlier ages and blend it with the modern ideas of good and evil. Almost all his poems deal with ancient Ireland ...

    Read More

  • Critical Analysis Of Easter, 1916

    1337 Words  | 3 Pages

    Throughout this poem, Yeats tries to grapple with how he actually feels about the unsuccessful Easter Uprising of 1916. He wrote this poem in 1921, which means he had five years to decide how he felt. But even after half a decade, he still can 't come down hard on whether the uprising was a good or bad idea publicly. Yeats does describe the men involved in both positive and negative light but tends to have more positive then negative showing that he actually supported the cause or maybe just the people involved. Yeats says one of them had "ignorant good will" (18) and a "shrill" voice (20). Still, though, no matter how he feels about the cause he believes he has to say something about these people and the legacy they left behind. At the end of the day, the speaker can 't get behind what happened in the Easter Uprising. But he can say that the fighters deserve to be remembered in a poem and that they 'll be remembered "Whenever green is worn" (78). So in the end, he never overcomes his sense that he was right to stay out of the conflict. But he 's still willing to acknowledge that the fighters didn 't die for

    Read More

More about Use of Dramatic Contrast in Yeats' Poetry

Open Document