Themes
The Relationship Between Art and Politics
Yeats believed that art and politics were intrinsically
linked and used his writing to express his attitudes toward Irish
politics, as well as to educate his readers about Irish cultural
history. From an early age, Yeats felt a deep connection to Ireland
and his national identity, and he thought that British rule negatively
impacted Irish politics and social life. His early compilation of
folklore sought to teach a literary history that had been suppressed
by British rule, and his early poems were odes to the
beauty and mystery of the Irish countryside. This work frequently
integrated references to myths and mythic figures, including Oisin
and Cuchulain. As Yeats became more involved in Irish politics—through
his relationships with the Irish National Theatre, the Irish Literary
Society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and Maud Gonne—his poems
increasingly resembled political manifestos. Yeats wrote numerous
poems about Ireland’s involvement in World War I (“An Irish Airman
Foresees His Death” [1919], “A Meditation
in Time of War” [1921]), Irish nationalists
and political activists (“On a Political Prisoner” [1921],
“In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz” [1933]),
and the Easter Rebellion (“Easter 1916” [1916]).
Yeats believed that art could serve a political function:
poems could both critique and comment on political events, as well
as educate and inform a population.
The Impact of Fate and the Divine on History
Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the development of
a unique spiritual and philosophical system that emphasized the
role of fate and historical determinism, or the belief that events
have been preordained. Yeats had rejected Christianity early in
his life, but his lifelong study of mythology, Theosophy, spiritualism,
philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound interest in
the divine and how it interacts with humanity. Over the course of
his life, he created a complex system of spirituality, using the
image of interlocking gyres (similar to spiral cones) to map out
the development and reincarnation of the soul. Yeats believed that
history was determined by fate and that fate revealed its plan in
moments when the human and divine interact. A tone of historically
determined inevitability permeates his poems, particularly in descriptions
of situations of human and divine interaction. The divine takes
on many forms in Yeats’s poetry, sometimes literally (“Leda
and the Swan” [1923]), sometimes abstractly
(“The Second Coming” [1919]). In other poems,
the divine is only gestured to (as in the sense of the divine in
the Byzantine mosaics in “Sailing to Byzantium” [1926]).
No matter what shape it takes, the divine signals the role of fate
in determining the course of history.
The Transition from Romanticism to Modernism
Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet
and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. When he began publishing
poetry in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical,
romantic style, and they focused on love, longing and loss, and
Irish myths. His early writing follows the conventions of romantic
verse, utilizing familiar rhyme schemes, metric patterns, and poetic
structures. Although it is lighter than his later writings, his
early poetry is still sophisticated and accomplished. Several factors
contributed to his poetic evolution: his interest in mysticism and
the occult led him to explore spiritually and philosophically complex
subjects. Yeats’s frustrated romantic relationship with Maud Gonne
caused the starry-eyed romantic idealism of his early work to become
more knowing and cynical. Additionally, his concern with Irish subjects
evolved as he became more closely connected to nationalist political
causes. As a result, Yeats shifted his focus from myth and folklore
to contemporary politics, often linking the two to make potent statements
that reflected political agitation and turbulence in Ireland and
abroad. Finally, and most significantly, Yeats’s connection with
the changing face of literary culture in the early twentieth century
led him to pick up some of the styles and conventions of the modernist
poets. The modernists experimented with verse forms, aggressively
engaged with contemporary politics, challenged poetic conventions
and the literary tradition at large, and rejected the notion that
poetry should simply be lyrical and beautiful. These influences
caused his poetry to become darker, edgier, and more concise. Although
he never abandoned the verse forms that provided the sounds and
rhythms of his earlier poetry, there is still a noticeable shift
in style and tone over the course of his career.
Motifs
Irish Nationalism and Politics
Throughout his literary career, Yeats incorporated distinctly
Irish themes and issues into his work. He used his writing as a
tool to comment on Irish politics and the home rule movement and
to educate and inform people about Irish history and culture. Yeats
also used the backdrop of the Irish countryside to retell stories and
legends from Irish folklore. As he became increasingly involved
in nationalist politics, his poems took on a patriotic tone. Yeats
addressed Irish politics in a variety of ways: sometimes his statements
are explicit political commentary, as in “An Irish Airman Foresees
His Death,” in which he addresses the hypocrisy of the British use
of Irish soldiers in World War I. Such poems as “Easter 1916”
and “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz” address individuals
and events connected to Irish nationalist politics, while “The Second
Coming” and “Leda and the Swan” subtly include the idea of Irish
nationalism. In these poems, a sense of cultural crisis and conflict
seeps through, even though the poems are not explicitly about Ireland.
By using images of chaos, disorder, and war, Yeats engaged in an
understated commentary on the political situations in Ireland and
abroad. Yeats’s active participation in Irish politics informed
his poetry, and he used his work to further comment on the nationalist
issues of his day.
Mysticism and the Occult
Yeats had a deep fascination with mysticism and the occult,
and his poetry is infused with a sense of the otherworldly, the
spiritual, and the unknown. His interest in the occult began with
his study of Theosophy as a young man and expanded and developed
through his participation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn,
a mystical secret society. Mysticism figures prominently in Yeats’s
discussion of the reincarnation of the soul, as well as in his philosophical
model of the conical gyres used to explain the journey of the soul,
the passage of time, and the guiding hand of fate. Mysticism and
the occult occur again and again in Yeats’s poetry, most explicitly
in “The Second Coming” but also in poems such as “Sailing to Byzantium”
and “The Magi” (1916). The rejection of Christian
principles in favor of a more supernatural approach to spirituality creates
a unique flavor in Yeats’s poetry that impacts his discussion of
history, politics, and love.
Irish Myth and Folklore
Yeats’s participation in the Irish political system had
origins in his interest in Irish myth and folklore. Irish myth and
folklore had been suppressed by church doctrine and British control
of the school system. Yeats used his poetry as a tool for re-educating
the Irish population about their heritage and as a strategy for
developing Irish nationalism. He retold entire folktales in epic poems
and plays, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889)
and The Death of Cuchulain (1939),
and used fragments of stories in shorter poems, such as “The Stolen Child”
(1886), which retells a parable of fairies
luring a child away from his home, and “Cuchulain’s Fight with the
Sea” (1925), which recounts part of an epic
where the Irish folk hero Cuchulain battles his long-lost son by
at the edge of the sea. Other poems deal with subjects, images,
and themes culled from folklore. In “Who Goes with Fergus?” (1893)
Yeats imagines a meeting with the exiled wandering king of Irish
legend, while “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899)
captures the experiences of the lovelorn god Aengus as he searches
for the beautiful maiden seen in his dreams. Most important, Yeats
infused his poetry with a rich sense of Irish culture. Even poems
that do not deal explicitly with subjects from myth retain powerful
tinges of indigenous Irish culture. Yeats often borrowed word selection,
verse form, and patterns of imagery directly from traditional
Irish myth and folklore.
Symbols
The Gyre
The gyre, a circular or conical shape, appears frequently
in Yeats’s poems and was developed as part of the philosophical
system outlined in his book A Vision. At first,
Yeats used the phases of the moon to articulate his belief that
history was structured in terms of ages, but he later settled upon
the gyre as a more useful model. He chose the image of interlocking
gyres—visually represented as two intersecting conical spirals—to
symbolize his philosophical belief that all things could be described
in terms of cycles and patterns. The soul (or the civilization,
the age, and so on) would move from the smallest point of the spiral
to the largest before moving along to the other gyre. Although this
is a difficult concept to grasp abstractly, the image makes sense when
applied to the waxing and waning of a particular historical age
or the evolution of a human life from youth to adulthood to old
age. The symbol of the interlocking gyres reveals Yeats’s belief
in fate and historical determinism as well as his spiritual attitudes
toward the development of the soul, since creatures and events must
evolve according to the conical shape. With the image of
the gyre, Yeats created a shorthand reference in his poetry that
stood for his entire philosophy of history and spirituality.
The Swan
Swans are a common symbol in poetry, often
used to depict idealized nature. Yeats employs this convention in “The
Wild Swans at Coole” (1919), in which the
regal birds represent an unchanging, flawless ideal. In “Leda and
the Swan,” Yeats rewrites the Greek myth of Zeus and Leda to comment
on fate and historical inevitability: Zeus disguises himself as
a swan to rape the unsuspecting Leda. In this poem, the bird is
fearsome and destructive, and it possesses a divine power that violates
Leda and initiates the dire consequences of war and devastation
depicted in the final lines. Even though Yeats clearly states that
the swan is the god Zeus, he also emphasizes the physicality of
the swan: the beating wings, the dark webbed feet, the long neck
and beak. Through this description of its physical characteristics,
the swan becomes a violent divine force. By rendering a well-known
poetic symbol as violent and terrifying rather than idealized and
beautiful, Yeats manipulates poetic conventions, an act of literary
modernism, and adds to the power of the poem.
The Great Beast
Yeats employs the figure of a great beast—a horrific,
violent animal—to embody difficult abstract concepts. The great
beast as a symbol comes from Christian iconography, in which it
represents evil and darkness. In “The Second Coming,” the
great beast emerges from the Spiritus Mundi, or soul of the universe,
to function as the primary image of destruction in the poem. Yeats
describes the onset of apocalyptic events in which the “blood-dimmed
tide is loosed” and the “ceremony of innocence is drowned” as the
world enters a new age and falls apart as a result of the widening
of the historical gyres. The speaker predicts the arrival of the
Second Coming, and this prediction summons a “vast image” of a frightening
monster pulled from the collective consciousness of the world. Yeats
modifies the well-known image of the sphinx to embody the poem’s
vision of the climactic coming. By rendering the terrifying prospect
of disruption and change into an easily imagined horrifying monster,
Yeats makes an abstract fear become tangible and real. The
great beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, where it will evolve
into a second Christ (or anti-Christ) figure for the dark new age.
In this way, Yeats uses distinct, concrete imagery to symbolize
complex ideas about the state of the modern world.
