William B Yeats Never Give All The Heart

The windowsill becomes symbolic of the queen’s spirit.  As the jester’s soul rises to the ledge, it hopes the queen’s spirit will allow him to enter. As the second stanza continues, one reads “It had grown wise-tongued by thinking / Of a quiet and light football”.  With each line smoothly transitioning to the next, the idea Yeats creates continuity without breaks.  Such a technique creates a feeling of acceleration, compelling a reader to carry on his thoughts from line to line.  As in the example, the jester has learned to speak with wisdom due to his constant thinking upon this game of love as a football.  A football has two points, one on each end, and travels in a direct path when thrown.  Love is a similar game, for it travels in a direct path from the sender to the receiver in hopes of being caught and returned.

The similarities between the poems lie in their abilities to utilize imagery as a means to enhance the concept of the fleeting nature that life ultimately has and to also help further elaborate the speaker’s opinion towards their own situation. In Keats’ poem, dark and imaginative images are used to help match with the speaker’s belief that both love and death arise from fate itself. Here, Keats describes the beauty and mystery of love with images of “shadows” and “huge cloudy symbols of a high romance” to illustrate his belief that love comes from fate, and that he is sad to miss out on such an opportunity when it comes time for his own death.

Yeats has composed an effectively concise poem of only twelve lines in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter is harnessed to replicate human speech patterns; as if the four rhetorical questions are being posed to the reader from the speaker. The romantic and personal content of this poem creates a certain level of intimacy the reader will feel with Yeats. With a simple ABABCDCDEFEF rhyming structure there is a crucial lack of rhyming couplets (often used to accentuate a couple 's closeness). Therefore a distance is already established between the speaker and their subject. Additionally, Yeats creates the emotional response to this poem by exploring historical, personal, political and classical mythological elements. Yet, at the very foreground this is a love poem, and the underlying focus on love makes this poem a typical lyric.

“The poetry of Yeats remains relevant because he examines both the local and universal through heightened symbolism.”

Yeats’ ongoing struggles and his search for truth are evident in the increasingly complex form of his poetry which challenges existing perspectives on mortality as well as philosophy on beauty and art in order to find new ways of perceiving the world. In ‘Wild Swans at Coole’ (1919), Yeats urges his readers to discover the inevitability of mortality through the guidance of his personal questioning; transience of natural beauty and art also encompasses an aspect of his search for truth. ‘Among School Children’ (1928) is a continuation of Yeats’ searching process as he encourages further insights by revealing acceptance of mortality and beauty of unity through sophisticated, modernist manipulation of poetic features.

The use of imagery within this poem is apparent from the very first stanza, “When you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book, and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep…” (Yeats). Within this passage the reader can identify that Yeats is portraying a scene in which the narrator is instructing another potential character to revisit past memories and experiences within a book. Despite the poem going on for two more stanzas, the identity of both the narrator and the person he or she is instructing remain anonymous; however, it can be inferred that these characters have had past experiences with each other. The second stanza is a continuation of the first, “How many loved your moments of glad grace, and loved your beauty with love false and true, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face” (Yeats). From this we can confirm that there was a potential romantic element to the relationship between the narrator and the unnamed character, the way that the narrator describes the

William Butler Yeats was not a man to keep quiet about his passions. He expresses his need for more than just reality throughout his poems, longing for the youthful desires of his heart. Yeats often talks about escaping reality and shifting to a realm of fantasy in which his deepest thoughts are brought forth. He reveals his unrequited love through the visionary elements in his poems. His use of sensory detail in each of the poems increases the fantastical notion of the poems. Yeats longs for the things he can no longer attain, such as love and youth. Two poems that display his youthful desires are “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and “The Wild Swans at Coole.”

The poem ends with a dark, depressing thought that Keats has. If he does not find love before he dies, then he believes his life was meaningless. He says that he will “stand on the shore of the wide world alone,” almost referring back to how he thought his mind was as big as an ocean. When Keats uses the phrase “unreflecting love” in what he desires, he

    Yeats speaks of the traditions that he followed to court Maud.  Men have laid out the laws on how to fall in love, and he followed these lessons.  These traditions now seem frivolous to him, since he doesn’t care anymore.  They did not work for him and he lost his love.  He is kind of angry that he was foolish enough to believe they would work.  He realizes that love is not an organized process and it, once again, requires

Yeats is bitter at his lover’s fainting beauty. Thomas tell about the aging life of his father; “Old age should burn and rave at the close of day” and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” He remembered his father’s will to live every day to the fullest, that the “close of day” is not an end, but the expectation of living for living the next day. Thomas seems grateful for his father’s fight to live for every moment of the

Throughout the whole poem, the symbolism makes the story dark and warning-like. The first stanza describes the state of society post-war and pre-Second Coming, when Yeats states “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, / and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned” (4-6). The symbolism in these lines shows that the state of the world is in

This predominant autobiographical quality of his work makes his poems thought provoking it gives the reader an insight into the reality of the poets life. The poet also talks about his life with a determined honesty, sometimes resulting in an unflattering portrait of himself, adds to this appeal. The final section of the second stanza in E16 deals with Major John MacBride. Yeats despised this man. He was married to Maud Gonne, the loves of Yeats’ life. Despite the personal animosity, which Yeats’ had towards MacBride, he admires his actions and sacrifices. “He had done most bitter wrong to some who are near my heart, yet I number him in the song”. This adds a personal aspect to the poem E16. The poem WSC is a deeply personal poem that discusses unrequited love. This poem evoked a sadness in me as I sympathised with Yeats. There’s something terribly tragic about the fact that in nineteen short years he has gone from being a young man who ‘trod with a lighter tread ‘, a man with all the possibilities of the world stretching before him, to one whose ‘heart is sore’. I definitely felt like there was a lesson for me there

Yeats work reaches an apex of tension in the line, "Surely the Second Coming is at hand" (Yeats 10). The belief buried deep within Yeat's conciseness of hopelessness may be seen in his writing. His writing may be his "personal conscious" allowing his "personal unconscious" to speak his

This was a strange poem because of the word form and how the words were used. Getting the hang of what was going on was a little tricky. Keats’s elegant style is very interesting and unique, but made for a bit of a challenge. In order to see a clear opinion on the mood of the poem I reread it to try and connect and see it as he saw it.

In the second stanza the poet experienced his physical power decaying continuously, and could not educate his soul in that country because every singing school, instead of caring for “monuments of unageing intellect” it seemed busy studying the monuments of its own significance (Gillespie). Yeats also mentioned that even if the body becomes old and “tattered,” the soul wants to live on and grow (Gillespie). He described himself as a “tattered coat upon a stick,” which indicates that the old man looks as helpless as a scarecrow (Gillespie). In order to leave this lifeless ‘scare-crow status’ Yeats sailed to Byzantium to transform