preview

Yeats Ireland Essay

Decent Essays

Yeats’ Ireland
William Butler Yeats is one of Ireland’s best known poets, writing twelve books of poetry in his lifetime in addition to numerous other works. His poetry often utilizes place and landscape – specifically the natural landscape of Ireland – to interpret the social and cultural landscape of the country. Some of his works, such as The Lake Isle of Innisfree or The Stolen Child, relay peaceful and serene depictions of landscape whereas poems such as Thoughts Upon The Present State Of The World, use landscapes in a more aggressive way to describe the harsh social climate of Ireland at the time. Yeats sought to revive the beauty of Irish landscape and culture, and became a national poet and a voice of Ireland in doing so. His use of …show more content…

(“Thoughts” 26-29)
The images of a war-torn landscape and the anonymity of the mother murdered at her door evoke the feelings of fear felt by readers in the time. Bradley writes “Yeats’ language broadens the context so that so that it could be any mother and child in the ravaged landscape of wartime” (115). The violet nature of the poem provides a domineering relation to place, one which feels inescapable. According to Michael Wood, violence in Yeats’ poetry “whether personal, political or apocalyptic—is always sudden and surprising, visible, unmistakable, inflicts or promises injury and is fundamentally uncontrollable.” Before his death in 1939, Yeats wrote a poem titled Under Ben Bulben. Ben Bulben is a rock formation, a part of the Dartry Mountains in Sligo. The poem details the place where Yeats wanted to be buried, just under Ben Bulben in the Drumcliff Churchyard. As such an influential, passionate poet of Ireland, he wanted to be buried surrounded by the landscapes that he grew up in. He writes,
Gardens where a soul’s at ease
The perfection is from peace
Where everything that meets the

Get Access