The Poetry of W.B. Yeats

The Poetry of W.B. Yeats is the prescribed selection of six poems by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865 to 1939), including The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium and Easter, 1916. The selection is set for HSC English Advanced Module B: Critical Study of Literature.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet whose long career runs from the twilight lyricism of the 1890s to the stripped, muscular verse of his last decades, and the prescribed selection belongs almost entirely to that harder later phase. He wrote through the most violent transformation in modern Irish history - the 1916 Easter Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War and the founding of the Irish Free State - and through the First World War, which convinced him that the settled European order was collapsing. Two private obsessions shape the poetry as much as public history: his lifelong, unrequited love for the revolutionary Maud Gonne, and his own ageing, as a man in his fifties and sixties measures the distance between a still-hungry mind and a failing body.

The prescribed poems are threaded on a single shape, the gyre - the spiral of history from Yeats's private mythology in A Vision, by which every civilisation winds to its widest point and turns into its opposite. "The Second Coming" is a twenty-two line vision of civilisation collapsing into prophecy. "Sailing to Byzantium" is the central statement of the ageing body's revolt, trading flesh for the golden bird of art. "Easter, 1916" commemorates and interrogates the executed leaders of the Rising in the same breath. "The Wild Swans at Coole" counts the unageing swans against a sore heart; "Among School Children" moves from a convent-school visit to the great unanswerable question of wholeness; and "Leda and the Swan" compresses the gyre into a single violent annunciation.

The gyre is the engine of Yeats's sense of history, and the verse makes the spiral felt before it is explained. "The Second Coming" opens with the syntax already enacting the system - "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer" - before the verdicts fall in end-stopped clauses: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". The famous balanced antithesis, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity", diagnoses a world in which moral energy has migrated to the wrong people, and the poem closes on a withheld question rather than an answer. "Leda and the Swan" is the gyre in miniature: "A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead", an entire catastrophe detonated rather than narrated.

Against history's collapse Yeats sets the ageing body's revolt. "Sailing to Byzantium" opens on the flat exile of "That is no country for old men" and reduces the aged body to "A tattered coat upon a stick" - with the whole escape route suspended on the hinge word "unless". The prayer that follows is violent in proportion to the stakes, "Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal", and the eternity it buys is admittedly man-made: to be gathered "Into the artifice of eternity" as "such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling" is a triumph and a diminishment in the same breath.

In "Easter, 1916" the refrain is the central technical achievement: "A terrible beauty is born" closes three of the four stanzas, altered by everything between its recurrences, the oxymoron coupling horror and glory without letting either win. The poem's honesty is that the myth never silences the doubt - "Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart" turns commemoration into warning, and the late question "Was it needless death after all?" is never answered.

The quieter poems measure the same losses in restraint. "The Wild Swans at Coole" sets the birds' undiminished vitality, "Their hearts have not grown old", against the barest line in the selection, "And now my heart is sore", withholding metaphor at the poem's emotional centre. "Among School Children" ends the other way, in abundance: the "sixty-year-old smiling public man" dreams of a life where "Labour is blossoming or dancing where / The body is not bruised to pleasure soul", and the selection's search for wholeness arrives as an image that resists analysis - "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" The question is the achievement, not a failure to answer.