William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939)

Am Irish poet who was born in Dublin, Yeats was a leader of the "Celtic Revival," and a founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. His early poetry is romanically and exotically lyrical, and he is influenced by the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Edmund Spencer. His abiding interest in mysticism and the occult was fostered by his love for the actress, Maude Gonne, as well as his marriage to Geogie Hyde-Lees. Both reinforced a leaning towards mystic symbolism and provide a "key" to his writing. He was a senator of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1928. He received the Nobel prize in 1923.

Romantic and lyrical, the early poetry includes "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," The Wind Among the Reeds (1899), and the plays, The Countess Cathleen (1892);  The Land of Heart's Desire (1894). He broke through in Responsibilities (1914) with a sharply resilient style. His later works include the prose work A Vision (1925 and 1937); and volumes of verse:  The Tower  (1928), and  Last Poems and Two Plays (1939).

Although he venerated the "immortal world" of the soul and the intellect, Yeats never abandoned the sensuous world of the body, but rather explored the tensions between the mortal and the immortal. He raged against his decreased physical powers in later years and spoke of  "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" in his work.Using the idiom and syntax of ordinary language, he created poems of extraorsinary lyricism and dramatic intensity. He explored, questioned, and explained the "monstrous familiar images" that "bewilder" and "perturb the mind."

                            The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand:
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
Aand what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
                 

            from  Words for Music Perhaps

              V. Crazy Jane on God

That lover of a night
Came when he would,
Went in the dawning light
Whether I would or no;
Men come, men go:
All things remain in God.

Banners choke the sky;
Men-at-arms tread;
Armoured horses neigh
Where the great battle was
In the narrow pass:
All things remain in God.

Before their eyes a house
That from childhood stood
Uninhabitied, ruinous,
Suddenly lit up
From door to top:
All things remain in God.

I had wild Jack for a lover;
Though like a road
That men pass over
My body makes no moan
But sings on:
All things remain in God.