Poets and Poems

W. B. Yeats

W.B. Yeats is a foremost figure in twentieth century English literature.

Willian Butler Yeats was born in June 1865, the oldest child of John Butler Yeats and his wife Susan Mary Pollexfen. His mother's ancestral home was in the future poet's beloved county Sligo where holidays were spent. In 1867 the family moved to England, returning to Dublin in 1880. William was educated at home, at the Gogolphin School in Slough and at the Erasmus Smith High School in Dublin, before attended Art College in the city from 1884 to 1886. His attention, however, had by then turned to poetry and his earliest writing dates from around that time. His first significant poem was 'The Island of Statues', a fantasy in a romantic style.

In 1887 the family returned to England, and in 1889 the poet met Maud Gonne who had admired 'The Island of Statues' and sought out the author. He was fascinated by her and two years later he proposed but was refused. She refused him again in 1899, 1900 and 1901. In 1903 she married the Irish nationalist John McBride*, but they parted the next year by mutual agreement. Gonne remained a major influence on Yeats's life and poetry. She shared his interest in the occult**, and like him was a member of the esoteric 'Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn'.

In 1917 he married 25 year old Georgie (George) Hyde-Lees, who shared his interest in the paranormal. She bore him two children, Anne (1919) and Michael (1921). Later in their marriage he had relationships with a number of other women.

In 1896, he was introduced to Lady Gregory, whose home at Coole Park in county Galway was an important meeting place for Yeats and others in the 'Irish Literary Revival'. She encouraged him to continue writing drama and in 1899 they were involved, together with a few others, in setting up what was to become the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which is still active.

In 1922 he was appointed to the Irish Senate, and in 1923 was awarded the Nobel Prize for his services to literature. He continued to write, producing some of his best work in the years that followed.

Suffering from angina, he died in January 1939 at the age of seventy-three. His ashes are buried in Drumcliff, Co. Sligo, a grave I visited with interest as a boy while touring with my family in the west of Ireland. I wondered there at the strange inscription*** he had chosen for his headstone.

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by.

* McBride was one of the leaders of the ill-fated Irish rebellion against the English. Yeats, although nationalist in sympathy, was antiwar and did not support the armed rebellion, as is evident in his poem 'Easter 1916' which names McBride among those executed. Yeats and Gonne consummated their relationship in Paris in 1908, but their night together left them both dissatisfied and was never repeated.
** Yeats had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult and there are many allusions to it in his poetry.
*** The inscription is in keeping with his final three brutal and disillusioned poems: 'Man and the Echo', 'The Circus Animals Desertion' and 'Politics'.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/01/the-deathbed-confessions-of-william-butler-yeats/283392/

The Wild Swans at Coole (1917)

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?