Discuss Yeats’ changing attitude to ‘Romantic Ireland’

It is wizard of the dualities in Yeats work that a poet historied for the universal forlorn love lyric should be so inextricably bound to the particular identity, struggle and destiny of the Irish nation. However, on closer examination, Yeats poetic style proves that seeming paradox is easily explained when the true disposition of Yeats idealism is taken into account. This essay sh e rattling last(predicate) argue the app arnt political rotatory commitment seen in the 1910s was close tothing of an aberration, in a transitional period of his career. To take root this transition, it is necessary to start at the beginning and end of his life, and work inwards, tincture the changing stageal of Ireland in his verse.The azoic Yeats was part of a untouchable amorous tradition. Its liking for the emotional authenticity of folk-lore found a misrepresent air in Yeats work, as he exploited the productive Irish apologueological tradition his long narrative works all encounter fro m this first stage. The first collection uses the ballad form frequently, and the simplicity of numberss standardised To An Isle in the Water shy star, shy sensation/ shy one of my heart / she moves in the firelight recalls tralatitious Irish poetry.Perhaps archetypal of Yeats beforehand(predicate) sen erantalist pieces is To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time. His treatment of Ireland and formal technique experience together under the auspices of traditional Romanticism he is unapologetic ab off drawing from Old Eire and the ancient federal agencys. The poem is popu riped by mythic and shadowy supposes from Irelands Gaelic ult the warrior-king Cuchulain, a druid, and Fergus, some season queen of Ulster. Despite coming from an Irish Protestant family, Yeats yet paints Ireland as a Celtic idyll, and evokes it using traditional Romantic imagery stars, the sea, woodlands, flowers. The use of the rosiness as a motif throughout his proto(prenominal) work is indebted(predicat e) non only to the Order of the Golden Dawn, just now to Blake in particular. twain shared a enigmatical magnetic inclination beyond Christianity echoed by Yeats take wish to be a seer-poet in the Irish tradition the custodian of the narrative of identity.Formally and technically, it bear witnesss the clear legacy of Romanticism too. The impoliteing line, in solid iambic pentameter, runs as a stylized invocation a common technique of traditional lyrical verse. The repetitions echo prayer, further intensify the religious dimension of the piece. The vocabulary, whilst not necessarily archaic, is certainly that of traditional poetic diction thine, whereof, boughs. There is a similar stylization in the phrase structure I would, before my prison term to go and personification of eternal yellowish pink wandering on her way.This phase of his poetry, kn let as the Celtic twilight period, is rich in similar poems their keynote being Irish themes and myth marry to Romantic st yle and concerns such as unrequited love, heroism and mystical union with nature. Other pieces which use Irish mythology are The Hosting of the Sidhe, The Song of rambling Aengus, but the idea of a Celtic idyll (derived from the Romantics radical reshaping of country idealism) runs throughout.This early work is a strong production line to his final collections, some three or four decades later. It is impossible to characterise such an elongated body of poetry with few examples, but the progression is distinctive. His cultural order of reference seems far wider, drawing on such diverse sources as a Quattrocento painters throng / A thoughtless image of Mantegnas thought1 to the famous symbolism of Byzantium, representing creative unity and the highest form of culture. Formally, the uniform elegiac spirit of the early verse (broken only by simple ballads and refrains) is replaced by more greater variety. Yeats background in theatre comes through in umpteen pieces relying on the dialogue form. There are in like manner the unique and unorthodox Crazy Jane poems, as well as series of lyrics and fragments of a few lines. The tone is far less stylised and less self-consciously Romantic Crazy Jane represent the apex of a far more open and natural diction.The portrayal of Ireland in these poems mirrors the modern progression in style. under(a) Ben Bulben sees Yeats rather desperately asking young writers to learn your trade and jog your mind on other days. This strikes a more resigned tone than the early To Ireland In The Coming Times where Yeats affirmed I cast my heart into my rhymes and evoked faeries, dancing under the moon / A druid land, a druid tune Parnells Funeral is not so much resigned, as starkly cynical, with Yeats stating all that was sung / all that was said in Ireland is a lie / bred out of the contagion of the throng. It is an spot shared in the acerbic The Great Day and also xix speed of light And Nineteen which describes the traff ic in mockeryWe, who s nevertheless years agoTalked of celebrate and truth,Shriek with pleasure if we try outThe weasels twist, the weasels toothThe poems in The Tower and The Winding Stair, particularly, portray melancholy despair which sees Yeats retreating, whether it be to the symbolic Byzantium, or his own watchtower at Coole Park. The everyday chaos of Ireland is left behind as Yeats surrenders to reflection. Yet this also marks a continuation amidst the deuce periods in the figure of a solitary, reflective artist a man in his own secret meditation / is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made (Nineteen coulomb and Nineteen.) We see, too, that Yeats had lost none of his gift for the lyric.Note the solemn mysticism of wine-dark midnight in the sacred wood (Her Vision In The Wood) or the powerful spiritual aphorism in Under Ben Bulben Many times man lives and dies / amidst his two eternities.This continuity, although at odds with the progressions already noted, helps to exp lain them. It is the vital delineate running through his transitional phase, unifying both early and late Yeats, and provokes fresh inquiry into the so-called political poems. Yeats was always a Romantic in the Keatsian or Tennysonian reflective strain, rather than the radical political spot. Hid poetry just about always came imbued with myth, otherness he proceeded from the Late Romantic period to form a kind of Romantic Modernism more characteristic of American poets such as Hart Crane. His interest in dream symbolism and reflex(a) writing also placed him with the impressionistic side of Modernism (eg.Surrealism) rather than the harsher or more violent wings (imagism, futurism etc.)Yeats myth-making and political romanticism is pellucidly apparent if the use of legend in the Celtic twilight phase is regularise under closer scrutiny. Without placing too much store on biographic details, Celticism (in the hands of Yeats and others) was double-edged. Although it did support nat ional identity and culture, it was also reinforcing imperial stereotyping of the Celts as irrational, feminine and emotional. By using the ancient myth of Ireland, Yeats was implicitly denying that Ireland had a present by glorifying the peasantry and the oppressed, he was implicitly affirming that Irelands place was as a subjugated nation.This paradox has been noted in a general thought by Edward Said to accept nativism is to accept the consequences of imperialism too willingly, to accept the very radical, religious and political divisions imposed on places like Ireland.2 Yeats is not a radical revolutionary idealism, but an imaginative idealism running along metaphysical and mythopoetic lines not historical or political ones.If this tendency the tendency to escape into myth is noted, the later pieces seem less removed from his early career. Yeats peppers his verse with references to former poets, and explicitly assumes the Romantic mantle for himselfSome martinet or mythologi cal poetCompares the solitary soul to a swanI am satisfied with that,Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.(Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen)He revels in the symbol of the winding stair to mythologise the poets climb to meditate on the turbulence of the world below. Whereas before Irelands enchanted past was the myth, now Ireland is yoked to greater schemes. The civil war representing the violence and disillusion of beingness to be set against the spiritual purity of the poet in his tower. The events in Ireland are chained to Yeats elaborate visions of cyclical annals set out in The back up Coming and The Gyres. The violence upon the roads (Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen and the rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop (Meditations in Time of civic War) are local analogues for the universal blood-dimmed tide of The Second Coming.Yeats s savings bank does celebrate Ireland it would be fallacy to suggest that the violence of the civilian War sickened his idealism so much he could never cheek Ireland again with anything but cynicism. However, his engagement was often wary, sometimes ironical the drink song of Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites. Neither can it be ignored that he occasionally refashioned his old Celtic schemes, most resplendently in Under Ben Bulben although even here it becomes a segment of a wider schema gyres run on / when that greater dream had gone.It is particularly interesting, although perhaps not surprising, that Yeats took the events of the civil war and immediately mythologised them. As mentioned above, the black-and-tan conflict becomes an antithetical tension in his meditative poems, or is encompassed into some larger historical cycle. In various pieces, the heroes of Irish independence take their historical place neatly alongside Wolfe Tone and the Celtic warriors. Even before the emergency of the Irish Free State had been decided, Yeats had abstracted the civil war and t he contemporaneous crisis into history and myth. It seems that in his poetry, Ireland had to be romantic.Which helps to explain exactly why Yeats had a plainly political phase. Essentially, for a brief period, the reality of Ireland suddenly became equal to the romantic ideal a struggle for an ideal and a dream, a forge of identity, a moment of historical crisis, death and beauty side by side. Yeats suddenly found that, for a moment, romantic Ireland seemed to be tentatively existent.It essential be noted that the political phase coincided beautifully with the technical and stylistic transition. It would be mere speculation to try to delineate some kind of causal relationship, but it is clear that by 1914 Yeats was searching for some kind of brisk poetic idiom. His patchy excursions into Imagist style verse in The Green Helmet show he was dissatisfied with simply creating carbon-copy Keatsian Celtic lyrics. It was also about this time that the first dialogue poems began to appe ar. Emotionally, the tone of the poetry is dejected too. Yeats grew weary of the sun and suggests he might have been content to live in Words. No Second Troyrebukes Gonne she filled my days / with misery, whilst the downbeat Lines written in Dejection sees him with energy but the embittered sun.It is seemingly with the Civil War that Yeats found a way to harness his Romanticism to both modern Ireland and to Modernism itself. The period was one of great variety in style and theme. Culminations of his wistful melancholia appear as late as The Wild Swans of Coole (notably the title poem.) Yet they lie side by side with dubious Modernist outings like The Balloon of the Mind and more no-hit sparse and clean verse like (perhaps supremely) easterly 1916.Poems like The Phases of the Moon and ego Dominus Tuus anticipate Yeats later metaphysical and philosophical bent. And he was still glorifying the Irish peasantry in pieces like The Fisherman. As Bloom points out the two years from late 1915 to late 1917 were the most important of Yeats imaginative life.3 sure enough no accident then, that such a time frame was equivalent to the opening of the Irish hostilities. A longer transitional period (Responsibilities to Michael Robartes) interlocks uncannily with the end of the Home Rule, the Easter Rising and the course of the Irish Civil War.Thus it appears the Irelands revolution either spurred Yeats poetic career on to new ground, or he exploited it to facilitate the transition. In September 1913, disenchant by the philistine and listless middle classes (symbolised by the greasy till), is among the strongest glorification of the Irish revolutionary traditionthey were of a different kind,The names that stilled your childish play,They have gone about the world like wind, merely little time had they to prayFor whom the hangmans rope was spun,And what, God help us, could they excuse?The second in the triptych of Yeats war poems (the other was Nineteen Hundred and Ninet een), was Easter 1916, where Yeats even questions the viability of art to encapsulate the glory of the revolutionaries no, no, not night but death. This is quite a reversal for an artist who is fiercely aware of the myth-making possibility of poetry, and the importance of the narrative bardic tradition to Irish identity. Yeats is quick to contrast the everyday polite meaningless words and the bourgeois world of eighteenth century houses with the sacrifice and honour of the 1916 rebelsWe know their dreams, enoughTo know they imagine and are deadAnd what if excess of loveBewildered them till they died?I write it out in a verse MacDonaugh and MacBrideAnd Connolly and Pearse.Yet even here, perhaps at the very apex of his political phase, there is interrogative too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart and foreboding of an destructive, irreversible change changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born.These two separate images remind us that Yeats was an imaginative (and not political) idealist, and evoke two of his emblematic concerns stasis, and the dying moment. Both his traditional and Modernist Romanticism are rooted in an intense awareness of time and history. The Celtic twilight poems, with their exploration of myth, unrequited love, and sorrow, sensualise and unify the tension between the Romantic polarity of eternity and transience compare with Blakes Auguries of Innocence or Shelleys To A Skylark. Whilst never fully leaving the shadow of the Romantics consider I meditate upon a swallows flight from Coole Park, 1929 he also engaged with the Modernist crisis of temporality. The Modernist project to toss off time has an ally of sorts in Yeats.One might consider the out of time reflections of the tower poems, the instant of rape enlarged into Leda and the Swan, the a-temporal juxtaposition of historical figures in The Statues, and of course the apocalyptic visions of The Second Coming and The Gyres. Note, too, the vast amount of materi al Yeats wrote on the experiences of aging and death.It is this obsession with time that reveals Yeats true image of Ireland. Ireland, for him at least, had to be romantic Ireland, otherwise it something to be rejected as inferior philistine, crude, fell and inimical to the soul of an imaginative artist. The Ireland of Yeats verse was always an Ireland of the past, an Ireland passing away, with one eye on the eternities of legend and history. The images of Ireland changed repeatedly yet the undertow of myth remained the same.For a brief period around Easter 1916 a time that fortuitously coincided with and perhaps enabled Yeats technical transition the reality of present Ireland was seemingly equal to its mythic past. It is ironic that Yeats most relevant and political poem was also his greatest act of myth-making. What was really changed, changed utterly was not the history of Ireland, but Yeats imaginative landscape. Ireland, once again, faded to romantic legend, and was dead and gone. Yeats slotted Pearse as heir to Cuchulain in his mythic schema, and continued his intrinsically timeless and ingrained quest, fusing Modernism, Romanticism and Ireland into his own poetic idiom.