William Butler Yates Essay Research Paper In

William Butler Yates Essay, Research Paper

In William Butler Yeats, we see a modern writer emerging from a society where religious faith, the notion of a common set of values, and the function of man are gone. Skepticism is prevalent, everything is doubted. We know that all of the events around him made him question a divine power, an afterlife, life in general, and the true purpose of life. We know that he had an obsession with a woman, Maud Gonne, who would deny him and marry another. He will propose to her daughter as well, a sense that he cannot lose. He has to have a part of the woman he has tried so hard to pursue. In Yeats Dialogue Between Soul and Self, we see him looking at the religious world around him and haunted by the fact that that secular world believes the award of Heaven to only be reached if man obeys God through his body, self, while here on earth. We see religious value starting to be strongly questioned, they are no longer the norm. It struck me that throughout the entire poem, even in the wording of the title, the self seems to be winning in Yeats mind. In Adam s Curse, Yeats is toiling over a love he has lost. We see that his notions of love are different than Romantic love. It is not a means of trancendance. The loss of love here goes hand in hand with the loss of valuing anything truly spiritual. He refers love to the moon. He says, A moon, worn as if it had been a shell, washed by time s waters as they rose and fell. We discussed in class that the moon, thus Yeats love, has become like as shell, there is no substance within. The substance, he goes on to tell us was once present, but over time and what I believe to be the waters of life, that love could not endure. He brings the moon on to stage and then empties all of the meaning out of it. This is truly an image of the loss of Romantic thinking. The things of society are replacing these values. The center could not hold, as we so often see. Just a few lines previous, with the mention of trade, we see him imply the fact that materialism was even corrupting love in this day. Materialism is one of those waters that are washing love away. The powers of the modern world are breaking down the virtues of man. At one point, we see Yeats create expectation in his reader through the title of his work, The Second Coming. We go on to see that Yeats is only playing on the second coming of Christ. The ideas of redemption that the title indicates will only be undermined in the work. We see he has no Romantic faith in innocence. He does not see man as inherently good and then corrupted by society. The landscape is only seen as an image of spiritual bareness. We know historically that Yeats write this in January, just before his first child in born in February. The child will change his life, he will love her. This is not, of course, romantic love. But we will see how he is concerned for her and the world in which he has helped to bring her into in A Prayer for My Daughter. In The Lady and the Swan Yeats will actually create a moment when the divine enters the body. The entire time we are reading of the moment we get a feeling of rape, the feeling that this spirituality is being forced on her. The same feeling that we will get in Mrs. Dalloway. So many people want to conform you. Spiritual beliefs are sometimes so forcefully presented to you. Lastly, rape is immediately seen as an act that is forced upon one person by another who does not truly love them. It is seen as anything but an act of love. I found we get a sense that no matter how horrible this may have been for her she still must have felt the spirituality of the moment. She still finds a hint of enjoyment in it as we sometimes hear a rape victim does in the terrible act that is forced upon them. In that case, there is often much shame involved, they are not supposed to enjoy it. But being human and in this body we are given, one sometimes does. Here Yeats is closer to the end of his life and is still toiling and possibly even yearning to believe it, he is different from the rape victim and that he feels shame in the fact that he truly can not. There is no love in any of these acts. In Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop we see love and spirituality intertwined. We see that the physical has to be there in order to experience transcendence, that same physical will die. Likewise, perfect love can only be experienced through the body. I included The Wild Swans at Coole because so often we see the swans as a symbol. They are a symbol of spiritual inspiration, and often a symbol of love. We get within them such a sense of loneliness; there is no love there. They are so impulsive, wild and caught up in the ways of the world. They have been corrupted as well and that sense of love and purity that this beautiful, white creature once had is gone. The spiritual inspiration is gone as well and once again we are left with once intertwined with the other and both essentially failing. Although he is born the century after Yeats, T.S. Elliot is once again a modernist poet and once again one that experienced unhappy love. In The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock we see Eliot looking at the artificial world around him that literary men always portray and the things of real life that truly do not matter. The title itself, in being labeled a love song, is a romantic clich . Through irony, he dismantles Romanticism. He shows us failed love. We have a true double vision. He sees himself surro