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William Butler Yeats essay
William Butler Yeats essay
William Butler Yeats essay
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When you are old This poem "When you are old" was written by William Butler Yeats during late 18th century to Maude Gonne. He wrote the poem for her to show his undying love even though she refused him several times already. It expressed author's admiration and sadness toward her. The first stanza of the poem the author forward the time when she becomes old and her grace has fade and she can read books author wrote for her to remember the past. The author wrote "When you are old and grey and full of sleep. And nodding by the fire, take down this book.And slowly read, and dream of the soft look. Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep" means that when she got old and to read his poems that he wrote for her it will be feel like dreaming and remembered the time when they were both young. She use to have the beautiful face and all the great times. In this stanza the author used imagery in line one and two to describe the image of what will things look like when time passed by. Also the …show more content…
" How many loved your moments of glad grace,And loved your beauty with love false or true,But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,And loved the sorrows of your changing face". In first two lines the author was saying that most of the people loved her only because of her beautiful face. They admired her face but not her soul. Maybe one day when she becomes old and full of wrinkles on her those people will flee her. But the author did not care how she looks but he loves the soul and heart of her. He loved the spirit that she has. The author had a really strong tone here because he was declaring a really strong message that no matter how she looks he will still love her as usual. It is the soul he loved but not the grace, he is expressing a very strong opinion though this stanza and showing the undying love of
'When you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire' (l.1-2) depicts the woman in her age, needing to nap more frequently. He speaks of a book (l.2) and the 'soft look' of her eyes (l.3-4). This book signifies a photo album that contains pictures of her as young adult.
I believe this poem shows her love for God and her love for religion. In the first six lines I believe she gives God the credit for her leaving Africa and going to America. In the fifth line,
In "Annabel Lee", a young man is mourning the death of a beautiful young lady. Even though the woman had died quite some time ago, the man is still in melancholy. He misses her terribly and constantly thinks of how she was she was tragically taken from him by the angels who were jealous of their love, and by her family who didn't think the he himself was capable of bringing her to her final resting place. He loved Annabel Lee more than anyother human can love another. The following quote tells the reader how much he loves her and shows that he would do anything for her, even if that means sleeping by her tomb, each and every night. "And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side of my darling, my life and my bride, in her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the side of the sea."
Time is endlessly flowing by and its unwanted yet pending arrival of death is noted in the two poems “When I Have Fears,” by John Keats and “Mezzo Cammin,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Keats speaks with no energy; only an elegiac tone of euphoric sounds wondering if his life ends early with his never attained fame. He mentions never finding a “fair creature” (9) of his own, only experiencing unrequited love and feeling a deep loss of youth’s passion. Though melancholy, “Mezzo Cammin,” takes a more conversational tone as Longfellow faces what is commonly known as a midlife crisis. The two poems progressions contrast as Keats blames his sorrow for his lack of expression while Longfellow looks at life’s failures as passions never pursued. In spite of this contrast, both finish with similar references to death. The comparable rhyme and rhythm of both poems shows how both men safely followed a practiced path, never straying for any spontaneous chances. The ending tones evoking death ultimately reveal their indications towards it quickly advancing before accomplish...
The poem begins by saying ‘I was a cottage maiden’. It is a simple beginning, talking in the past tense. She tells us she is lower class person.
The beginning of the poem lets the reader know that the old lady is upset about her current lifestyle and where she thinks it will lead her. She longs for the days when she was young and beautiful and everybody looked at her and wanted her. When the boy takes her groceries out to her car, she wanted him to see her in that way but she knows that her physical appearance has changed to the point where she no longer gets those same yearning looks anymore. I got the impression that she feels she is not fitting into this present decade and that she only knows best what happened in her prime years. When she was younger, people turned their heads and actually noticed her. But now she is angry about her lack of influence on the world. The line "as I look at my life, I am afraid only that it will change, as I am changing," means that she fears her life may get even more worse than it has already become. She spends her time alone contemplating all of this and trying to come to terms with the future. She is afraid of her aged face and hates what it has turned into. The youthfulness of her past has completely left her and now she is forced to deal with the present. I think it is apparent that she is afraid of dying because when she went to the funeral and saw her friend's face, she thought of herself lying there in the casket.
This is shown through the tone changing from being disappointed and critical to acceptance and appreciative. The speaker’s friend, who after listening to the speaker’s complaints, says that it seems like she was “a child who had been wanted” (line 12). This statement resonates with the speaker and slowly begins to change her thinking. This is apparent from the following line where the speaker states that “I took the wine against my lips as if my mouth were moving along that valved wall in my mother's body” (line 13 to line 15). The speaker is imagining her mother’s experience while creating her and giving birth to her. In the next several lines the speakers describe what she sees. She expresses that she can see her mother as “she was bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then bearing down, pressing me out into the world” (line 15 to line 18). The speaker can finally understand that to her mother the world and life she currently lived weren't enough for her. The imagery in the final lines of this poem list all the things that weren’t enough for the mother. They express that “the moon, the sun, Orion cartwheeling across the dark, not the earth, the sea” (line 19 to 21) none of those things matter to the mother. The only thing that matter was giving birth and having her child. Only then will she be satisfied with her life and
Stanzas one and two of the poem are full of imagery. The first stanza sets the scene for the poem “in a kingdom by the sea” (Poe 609) which makes you feel as if the story is going to have a “romantic” (Overview) feel to it. Then Annabel Lee comes into the story with “no other thought than to love and be loved by me” (Poe 609); This sentence is full of imagery in the sense that it makes you feel the immense capacity of love Annabel Lee had for the speaker if that was her only thought. In the second stanza the imagery takes a turn that shifts from loving and inviting to pain; The love between Annabel and the speaker was so strong that
The poem says that "since feeling is first" (line 1) the one who pays attention to the meaning of things will never truly embrace. The poem states that it is better to be a fool, or to live by emotions while one is young. The narrator declares that his "blood approves" (line 7) showing that his heart approves of living by feeling, and that the fate of feeling enjoyment is better than one of "wisdom" (line 9) or learning. He tells his "lady" (line 10) not to cry, showing that he is speaking to her. He believes that she can make him feel better than anything he could think of, because her "eyelids" (line 12) say that they are "for each other" (line 13). Then, after all she's said and thought, his "lady" forgets the seriousness of thought and leans into the narrator's arms because life is not a "paragraph" (line 15), meaning that life is brief. The last line in the poem is a statement which means that death is no small thi...
New York: Norton, 2000. Ramazani, Jahan. " The Elegiac Love Poems: A Woman Dead and Gon(n)e. " In Yeats's Poetry, Drama, and Prose.
This poem is not only a prayer to God to heal her unhealthy body, but it is thanking God for helping her in the past. In lines twenty-one and twenty-two, Anne writes, “Thou heard’st, Thy rod Thou didst remove And spared my body frail” (Bradstreet 277), These two lines, among other Anne Bradstreet poems, tells me that Anne was not a selfish women, she knew that she must thank God for what he has done for her in order for him to help her again. Anne was a very considerate person she was always looking out for others, mainly her children and husband. Toward the end this poem Anne Bradstreet is giving glory to God. She is thanking him for not only curing her illness at that time, but also thanking him for helping her with everything else that goes on in her life.
of the difficulty in acceptance. In the first few stanzas the poet creates the impression that she
... Therefore, instead of losing mental stability because of old memories, one should try to embrace sanity and perpetuate it in life. Moreover, the poem emulates society because people fantasize about looking a certain way and feeling a certain way; however, they are meddling with their natural beauty and sometimes end up looking worse than before. For instance, old men and women inject their faces to resemble those in their youth, but they worsen their mental and physical state by executing such actions. To conclude, one should embrace her appearance because aging is inevitable.
To begin, When You Are Old by William Butler Yeats discusses the idea of change in life. In this poem Yeats is a bitter man angry about the way his woman would not marry him. He goes to say some harsh things in a lovey way and tends to get his point across. His poem begins by saying on page 1140 lines 1-2, “When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book,” Here Yeats disc...
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...