Gangreiliu Panmei

Roll no # 581
Q) Comment on Yeats romanticism with the idea of past and
permanence.

William Butler Yeats, the last Romantic poet who became a leading
modern poet. He was born on 13 June 1865 in Dublin by Susan
Pollenfen, who was the daughter of one of the richest shipping family in
Silago. Yeats, an Irish poet and one of the foremost important figures of
the 20
th
century literature. His desire was to be identify himself as an
Irish poet/ writer and to build up the style of Irishness as a cultural
identity. There are some prominent people that impacted Yeats work
and one of them is John O Teary, who was a Fenian leader who came
back to Ireland. His patriotism and his ideas impressed Yeats. The books
that he lended him built his new and profound interests on the Irish
legendary. And the other lady, which we could never forget is his
beloved Maud Gome, a revolutionary who supported the independence
of Ireland from the English Monarch. He proposed her for marriage,
which was refused by her many times. Yeats was very much fascinated
by her philosophy than her outward beauty. Maud Gonne rejection of
his proposal influenced upon his life and his imagination of his literary
works. Another person, Lady Gregory helped Yeats and encouraged him
on his interests of Irish folklore. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge
together built the Abbey theatre.
Yeats also won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923 despite much
criticism. During the time of Yeats, the idea of Modernism was uprising.
A lot of modernist poets arose like the name; Virginia Woof, Richard
Strauss. Yeats was between the age of end of Romanticism and the
beginning of Modernism. T.S. Eliot and Auden criticize Yeats work as
not a modernist poet.
The use of Past and Permanence as seen in the work of Yeats as a
Romantic as well as a Modernist poet. He uses myth working and
linking with past and present that is the Permanence. Romantic that is
the conscious self and the Modernist, unconscious self. Yeats works
were influenced by the Romantic poets like Blake, Shelley. Yeats use of
imagination and imaginative speakers seek to move beyond nature into
a more permanent world of spirit. Yeats is also a devotee of the
intellectual beauty. Yeats interest in folklore and heroic legends which
is of the past and compares and draw a parallel with that of his present.
In the poem, Leda and the Swan; Leda who is the mother of Helen
who is raped by Zeus who comes in the form of a swan. Here, Yeats
goes back to the mythical past of the Greek literature by taking or
objectifying Leda as Ireland, who us fighting independence from
England. Zeus is represented as England who controls and has the
power. Yeats shows the political problems by giving imaginary
examples of the Greek story which is of the past.
The state of permanence which Yeats desires for the time then is not
altogether divorced from the physical heterogeneous world but it is
dependent on it in some measure.
Another work of Yeats that is, Sailing to Byzantine also shows us the
idea of Past and Permanence. The title of the poem means an individual
journey or an escape to a distant imaginary land, where the speaker
finds a mystical union with beautiful, eternal work of art. Here it is
going back to the past. The reference here is to Ireland, a symbol for a
state of mind, physical pleasure. In this poem, Yeats basic problem of
remaining in and out of life at once, of indulging in the blood and more
of life and at the same time reaching a pure state of being, or
permanence, recurs. In the opening stanza we are presented with state
of youth, a sensuous life with emphasis on productivity and
regeneration that is reminiscent of the nymphs and satyrs of News
for the Delphic Oracle that copulate in the form. The primary
opposition in the poem is that of the sensual and the intellectual and
this opposition is presented in terms of the stability of the younger
generation, which is signified in the closing lines of the first stanza.
The ultimate goal of the journey, than is the fusion of Sensual music
and monuments, that is the sensual with the spiritual and the
temporary and the permanent. In order to effect this fusion, the
protagonists must take on some of the characteristics of the innocence.
Therefore, he calls upon, Sages standing in Gods holy fire, and
invokes them to gather into the artifices of eternity. The body formed
of a Byzantine work of art, a bird which will be animate in the sense
that it sinks to the emperor but inanimate as a work of art. The
permanent being, as a represented in the bird, is then a combination of
bodily formed and spiritual existence, and in this sense the Starlit or
Moonlit doom of Byzantine also represents an artistically
transcendent accomplishment which disdains the purely human.
The idea of permanence is also seen in another work of Yeats Among
school children which is resolved by the seizing of the individual from
life in order to gain a proper perspective of life, and it is again a
situation in which the natural and supernatural are intermixed. Nuns
and mothers Worship in images as a means they hope of
understanding the presence of which they are.
Sailing to Byzantine represents the attainment of permanence in life
and Among school children the attainment of permanence through
the reconciliation of the abstract youth life.
In another poem the idea of the stone in the stream of life is again
presented in The man and the Ego. In this poem the protagonist goes
to a pit where a broken stone lies and he poses questions to the ageless
and permanent object in the hope of resolving in his own mind.
Yeats perfectly has as a romantic and also a modernist poet have given
the idea of past and permanence in most of his poetry ever written.