W. B. Yeats
In this section of our poetry study, we’ll consider representative works by well-known poets, members of the established literary canon. I’ll give brief introductions in the lectures, so that you can understand where the poets “fit” in history and in literary history. Most of our attention, however, will be on the texts of poems by Yeats, Sexton, Webb and Blake. I selected these poems because they relate to the themes of the course: the getting of wisdom and literary youth and maturity.
Below is a painting of Yeats by George Charles Beresford, 15 July 1911, National Portrait Gallery, London. Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Butler_Yeats_by_George_Charles_Beresford.jpg
William Butler Yeats was a leading poet and literary figure of the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century. One of his biographers, Richard Ellmann, whose books on Yeats were published after World War II, refers to him as “the dominant poet of our time” (Yeats: The Man and the Masks. London: Faber and Faber, 1960, 1).
Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865, but spent his childhood partly in his mother’s home in the wild western district of Sligo in Ireland, and partly in London. Yeats’s intellectual and emotional orientation remained Irish, and in adult life he was a leading defender of Irish culture against the dominance of Anglo-Saxon literature and art. Some of his poems, for example “Easter 1916,” protest against the injustices of British rule in Ireland. Yeats went to great lengths to recover and revitalise the ancient legends and stories of Ireland in modern, accessible forms.
Yeats and his patroness Lady Gregory < https://www.britannica.com/biography/Augusta-Lady-Gregory> founded an Irish literary movement and a national theatre, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin: https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/about/history/. Yeats himself was a prolific playwright. His plays, and those by other Irish dramatists, including John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey, were first performed at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The Abbey was famous for the turbulent responses which the political plays often provoked from the audience. Although Yeats composed poems very slowly, often writing only a few lines in a day, he published fourteen substantial volumes of poetry over the course of his long life. They are based on a complex network of personal experiences and political and spiritual ideas and ideals. If you would like to explore Yeats’s work further, I recommend A. Norman Jeffares edition, W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1962).
Yeats died while on holiday in southern France 1939. After World War II his remains were disinterred and reburied, as he had requested, in Drumcliff churchyard in county Sligo, near where he had lived as a child, and within sight of the beautiful mountain Ben Bulben. If you tour in Ireland, make sure you visit Yeats’ grave. It’s a moving experience.
“A Prayer for My Daughter”
Yeats composed “A Prayer for My Daughter” a few weeks after the birth of his first child, Anne Butler Yeats, on 24 February 1919. The setting is Yeats’s estate of Thoor Ballylee, near Coole in Sligo. The estate and family home, which Yeats purchased in 1917 shortly before his marriage to Georgina Hyde-Lees, consisted of a cottage, a mill, and a renovated Norman tower (i.e. from the 1100s). (The Tower figures in many of Yeats’s poems; you might like to visit if you go to Ireland.)
Yeats subscribed to a complex philosophy and spirituality, which was never static, but evolved and changed throughout his life. One aspect of his system was a sense of history as progressing through cycles, each of about two thousand years. Following the cataclysm of the World War I, Yeats anticipated with dread the end of the Christian era, when he felt that violent and destructive forces would create an anti-civilisation. (Let’s hope that this premonition isn’t playing out now, in climate change and the many conflicts and disasters of the twenty-first century.)
Dread is the feeling as the speaker contemplates his daughter’s future at the beginning of the poem:
STANZAS ONE AND TWO
For Yeats as a new father, the storm, and the wind(s) “bred on the Atlantic,” which “scream upon the tower,” and the elms, threatened by “the flooded stream,” symbolise the destructive years ahead. The poet’s prophetic fear is captured in the ending to Stanza One, “the great gloom that is in my mind,” and climaxes in the three lines that conclude Stanza Two. “Dancing to a frenzied drum” and “the murderous innocence of the sea” suggest the insanity of war and the speed and inevitability of the coming cataclysm. As part of nature the sea appears to be innocent, but as a symbolic womb for the years of dissolution it is “murderous.” Lady Gregory’s wood, the Yeats’s family tower, and the elm are symbols for civilisation, soon, in the poem’s prophetic vision, to be destroyed. Trees and the sea, frequent symbols in Yeats’s poetry, are here opposed in significance: civilisation (trees) versus approaching destruction (the sea).
STANZA THREE
The intense unhappiness and insecurity produced by the thought that his daughter will live through the imminent cataclysm inspires the poet’s prayer, which begins at the third stanza and dominates the poem until consolation and a feeling of stability builds and is finally achieved in the ending to stanza Ten.
“A Prayer for My Daughter” is typical of Yeats’s poetry in its interweaving of abstract spiritual thought with personal passion and recollection. His prayer in Stanzas Three to Six, that his daughter should be granted moderate, rather than absolute beauty, develops a contrast between what he wishes for her and what he knew of the dedicated Irish nationalist, Maud Gonne. In a famous literary love affair, Yeats courted Maud passionately but unsuccessfully for nearly thirty years before his happy marriage to “Georgie,” his baby daughter’s mother. In Stanza Three, he states that absolute beauty, such as he saw in Maud, can become an end in itself, excluding its possessor from friendship and from the intuitive intimacy which makes the right choice of a lover.
STANZA FOUR
In Stanza Four, the speaker makes Helen of Troy, in ancient Greek legend as perpetuated in Homer’s Iliad, the most beautiful woman in the world, his first parallel for Maud Gonne. As the wife of Menelaus, brother of the Greek king, Agamemnon, Helen was bored – “found life flat and dull.” When the Trojan prince, Paris, whom Yeats describes as a “fool,” ran off with her, thereby initiating the Trojan war, she had more trouble. (The poem may imply a parallel between Paris and Maud Gonne’s alcoholic husband, John MacBride, who nevertheless died heroically when executed by the British for his part in the Irish Republican rising of 1916.)
Secondly, Stanza Four draws a parallel between Maud and Aphrodite, the Greek name for Roman Venus, the goddess of love, who was born out of sea-foam, and therefore had no father. Aphrodite chose the lame Hephaestus, blacksmith of the gods, for her husband. The Horn of Plenty refers to the suckling of the infant Zeus, destined to be the father of the gods, by the goat, Amalthea, whose horns flowed with nectar and ambrosia (drink and food of the gods). The stanza implies that the abundance of divine gifts–Horn of Plenty–bestowed on beautiful women like Maud can be rendered futile: such “fine women eat/ A crazy salad with their meat.” Therefore their superabundant gift of beauty cannot reach its natural fulfilment in happy sexual love and children.
STANZA FIVE
Here Yeats prays for gifts for his daughter—not (given the examples of Maud, Helen and Aphrodite) that she should be outstandingly beautiful, but that she should possess courtesy and charm—qualities that can save a man from foolish pursuit of perfect beauty. The closing line is Yeats’s graceful tribute to Georgie, whose “glad kindness” has won his faithful, loving regard. By emphasising courtesy as the heart of his daughter’s education, Yeats begins to establish an antithesis to the cataclysmic disorder which threatens civilisation in Stanzas One and Two.
STANZA SIX
In Stanza Six the poet prays that his daughter may have the gift of stability; may she have no purpose other than dispensing joy to those around her; may she be merry and enjoy life’s richness; may she not need to wander in search of fulfilment, but find delight in being one place. These wishes develop through a metaphor, “a flourishing hidden tree,” and similes: “like the linnet,” (a song-bird; birds are another frequent symbol in Yeats’s poetry, often signifying lightness of spirit); and “like some green laurel” (a tree whose leaves in the Greek and Roman worlds symbolised victory in war, sport and the arts, including poetry).
Here the prayer is for a spiritual distinction, associated with abundant growth (“flourishing”), benevolence and generosity. May his daughter’s thoughts be a blessing, uplifting the mood of those around her. May she be gifted with light-heartedness —“merriment” is repeated—and stability, “one dear perpetual place.” May she live like the laurel tree, a symbol of civilisation and artistic (poetic) order.
The poem has arrived at the insight that true accomplishment and love for others does not consist necessarily of benevolent outward activity. Inner contentment and light-heartedness can be a greater gift to those around us.
STANZA SEVEN
The poet claims that his misdirected affection has “dried up” his mind, i.e. his creativity. Yet he knows one thing: “that to be choked with hate/ May well be of all evil chances chief.” By contrast, a mind free from hatred is safe from the criminal wind of chance and change:
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never blow the linnet from the leaf.
The linnet is a small, colourful European song-bird. For as long as hatred does not become a habit–“choked with hate”–, Yeats’s daughter will remain a source of spiritual lightness.
STANZA EIGHT
This stanza revisits Yeats’s unfulfilled love for Maud Gonne, whose outstanding loveliness, coupled with an “opinionated mind,” did not save her from making bad bargains, among them political activism. The focus is on the uselessness and destructiveness of opinions, especially about politics. “An intellectual hatred is the worst”– impersonal and calculated, this is worse than passionate (spontaneous) hatred. Maud, the loveliest woman ever born, sold her birthright, the Horn of Plenty, for an old bellows that makes wind for a horn which she could use to lecture the world.
Given our usual definitions of disaster as physical impairment, or loss of possessions, or the long list of worldly failures, the idea that “an intellectual hatred is the worst” is a radical thought. Implicit in the symbolism of the horn is a recognition, common to ethics and shared by many religions and spiritual systems, of the supreme value of silence over words, especially wordy expressions of opinions.
STANZA NINE
Innocence remains, but it is an innocence transformed — no longer “murderous” like that of the sea in Stanza One, but “radical.” In a supreme state of absolute simplicity, at the very root (radix) of reality, the soul rediscovers its identity with all that exists, knows that its will is in accord with the divine will, and that it shares God’s spontaneous delight in creation. This rediscovery protects against all adversity. Even if the prophesied winds of destruction “howl” simultaneously from all points of the compass, the inner happiness of Yeats’ daughter will be unshakeable. She will be established in an inner spiritual freedom. Stanza Nine is the most profound in the poem.
STANZA TEN
The concluding stanza moves away from the deeply personal and spiritual. Instead it consummates in an historical frame the themes of civilisation and destruction raised at the beginning. Looking far forward to his daughter’s marriage and probably referring backwards to his own, Yeats emphasises that custom and ceremony defend civilisation against the storms of destruction feared in Stanzas One and Two and against the windy misdirection implied by the bellows symbol. The symbols of the Horn and the laurel tree are also revisited, but with changed resonances:
- By associating ceremony with the Horn of Plenty, the poem shows that ceremony is abundantly fertile, just as Yeats and Georgina have been in their marriage. This contrasts with the Horn’s association in Stanza Three with the fruitless beauty of Maud Gonne.
- By linking custom (civilised traditions) with the laurel tree, the poem emphasises the stability, protectiveness and flourishing nature of custom. This closure consummates the image’s earlier appearance in Stanza Three—“O may she live like some green laurel.”
By restoring the speaker’s—and hopefully also the reader’s—confidence and peace, the poem has accomplished one of the purposes of prayer. The threat posed by the screaming winds was imaginatively neutralised in Stanza Nine. Stanza Ten does not mention the winds.
A Few Thoughts on Technique
Multiple technical features of the language reinforce the meanings traced above. Yeats’s poetic craft is obvious in the regular rhyming scheme (aabbcddc) of the eight-line stanzas, a complex patterning that announces order and ceremony as important themes.
The dominant metre is iambic (weak-strong). In Stanza One the heavy, irregular trochaic feet (strong-strong) suggest the perturbation of nature in the violent wind, which matches the disturbance in the speaker’s mind. It is interesting that the words, “can be stayed” in Stanza One correspond with a “staying” of the rhythm (weak-strong-strong). The poem’s closing iambic line is a triumphant reassertion of order: “And custom for the spreading laurel tree.”
Such correspondences between form and meaning are a feature of the poem, found also in alliteration and assonance: “Dancing to a frenzied drum” echoes the drumbeat (onomatopoeia). In “like the linnet and “live like some green laurel” (Stanza Six), the “l” sounds contribute to the evocation of light, joyful, spiritual living. The legal phrase, “Assault and battery” in Stanza Seven hints at a personalised violence as civilisation tears itself apart, but the stabilising repetition of “l” sounds–“Can never tear the linnet from the leaf”– affirms spiritual beauty as unshakable.
Finally, “A Prayer for My Daughter” is like others of Yeats’s poems in that it works with dichotomies, or pairs of opposites:
the destructive sea versus the stable land-based tower or tree;
the changing era versus the safety of civilisation and tradition;
Maud/Helen/Venus versus Georgina/Anne;
frustration versus fulfilment
infatuation versus love.