Themes associated with Yeats' works

1. Reoccurring themes in Yeats‘ works
What are their importance?
And,
How is each theme portrayed?

2.  Time is a big theme in Yeats‘ works
 Often Time is portrayed negatively and seems to be the real
enemy, like in ‗Broken Dreams‘ and ‗In the Memory of Eva Gore-Booth
and Constance...‘
 In Yeats‘ later works it seems he is both obsessed and frustrated with
time

3.  ―There is grey in your hair‖ –Maud‘s beauty withered with time
 ―But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed –‖ –Maud was once
beautiful in her youth, Maud may have lost some of her appeal; but
Yeats looks forward to the afterlife when her former beauty will be
restored (which is quite fickle). It seems here beauty is only in the eye
of the beholder
 The enjambment in the poem also reflects time as Yeats uses this
technique to reminisce about the past when Maud was in her prime
 Here time has stolen Maud of her youth and beauty which has
changed some of Yeats‘ feelings for her

4.  ―Blossom from the summer‘s wreath‖ –as from the first four lines, the
girls were clearly beautiful in their youth but here Yeats is saying that
time has stripped them for their beauty as they are now ―When
withered old and skeleton-gaunt‖
 ―Dear shadows‖ – shadows of the past, past memories
 ―Have no enemy but time‖ –time is the true enemy here
 As in ‗Broken Dreams‘, time seems to have a damaging effect on the
girls‘ beauty as it has ‗withered‘ them.
 However time is not so bad as at the start of the poem Yeats‘ is
reminiscing about the old Georgian mansion, where he himself spent
a lot of time at: ―The light of evening, Lissadell/ Great windows open
to the south‖

5.  “Vanished and left but memories, that should be out of season/With
the hot blood of youth..” –here Yeats could be looking back on his
youth, these memories are however ambiguous as we don‘t know
whether these are good memories or if he is reflecting on his
mistakes

6.  ―Under the October twilight the water/ Mirrors a still sky;‖-nature
seems to be harmonious; but also here we are reminded by the sky
that with time and the change of seasons that the sky changes too
 ―The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me‖
 ―in great broken rings‖- time and its continuous cycle, time is
something greater than us humans: destiny, ‗the bigger picture‘
 The structure itself almost mimics time as each stanza in the poem
seems to reflect a different part of the year/season. However, time
has only left Yeats lonely and deep in reflection

7.  ―Did that play of mine send out/ Certain men the English shot?‖
 ―Did words of mine put too great strain/ On that woman‘s reeling
brain?‖
 ―Could my spoken words have checked/ That whereby a house lay
wrecked?‖
 Yeats here is reflecting back on his life, doubting himself, wondering if
he did the right thing
 Again, a reoccurring thought of Yeats‘, with time comes damage as we
see by the third quote as it refers to the destruction of Coole Park and
Lady Gregory‘s mansion

8. The Cat and the Moon
 The moonlight shines on the cat making the cat
magnificent, complimenting the cat as Yeats‘ works as the moon (Maud)
is the muse behind Yeats‘ works
The Wild Swans at Coole
 ―Under the October twilight the water/ Mirrors a still sky;‖
 ―Unwearied still, lover by lover,‖
 Here nature is harmonious as the water is still and the swans are sat side
by side
The Man and the Echo
 In contrast to ‗The Wild Swans at Coole‘ Nature here is volatile and
destructive, even to an extent random and pointless
 ―Up there some hawk or owl has struck,
Dropping out of sky or rock,
A stricken rabbit is crying out,
And its cry distracts my thought‖

9. Sailing to Byzantium
 Nature here is presented to be harmonious ―the young in one
another‘s arms, birds in the trees‖ –Yeats seems bitter as they have
each other and their looks, Yeats again is wallowing in self-pity
The Stolen Child
 ―wandering water gushes‖
 ―the waters and the wild‖ –idea of being free and in touch with nature

10.  Yeats uses opposites to emphasis his main points in his poems
 In The Cold Heaven opposites are used to re-enforce that some
relationships/concepts cannot work as they are so different
 Opposites in The Fisherman, are used to contrast the past, which
Yeats clings so tightly to, and the modern world which Yeats despises.
Art can no longer survive in a hedonistic world where all that matters
is procession and pleasure
 In The Cat and the Moon, the use of binary opposites show how
distant the cat and the moon are emotionally and physically. No
matter how hard the cat (Yeats) tries he could never have the moon
(Maud) , the two are so different maybe it was never meant to be...

11. Broken Dreams
 ―But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed –‖ Here Yeats looks forward
to the afterlife when he will be reunited with Maud, and her former
beauty has been restored
The Cold Heaven
 ―rook-delighting‖ – an omen of death; Yeats is not sure if the afterlife
is a good or bad thing as it is uncertain what awaits him
 A death-delighting heaven which is a very unlikely combination when
we think of the two
 ―Riddled with light‖-this is used to represent the body dying

12. The Man and the Echo
 ―Echo. Lay down and die.‖ – is death the only way out?
 ―What do we know but that we face/ One another in this place?‖ –
here, like in ‗The Cold Heaven‘, Yeats is questioning what is there
after death and if there is a Heaven
The Second Coming
 ―The blood dimmed tide is loose‖ –here it is referencing Revelation
17:3-6 which says that ‗the beast‘ will come as a predecessor to the
second coming of Christ.
 The poem ends with a rhetorical question leaving our fates in the
balance of life and death

13. An Irish Airman Foresees his Death
 The tight structure creates an echo effect as if the airman is certain to
die
 ―I KNOW that I shall meet my fate/ Somewhere among the clouds
above;‖-here there is a sense of that the airman is destined to die
 ―In balance with this life, this death‖ –the airman‘s life in the hands of
fate
 ―waste of breath‖ –is there no way to stop this from happening?
 ―A lonely impulse of delight‖ –this phrase itself is ambiguous; however
it could be interoperated as the airman taking pleasure in
killing/death
Sailing to Byzantium
 Yeats paints a negative self-portrait, he is bitter about his own ageing
and decay therefore he reduces himself to ―a tattered coat upon a
stick‖ ―An aged man is but a paltry thing‖

14. The Fisherman
 ―The freckled man who goes/ To a gray place on a hill/ In gray
Connemara clothes/ At dawn to cast his flies—‖ –here we have an
idealistic picture of a rural Ireland where men work hard doing physical
tasks
 Yeats longs for an ideal audience who appreciate art and are just as
intelligent as himself
 The use of opposites emphasises that the old world (a world long past)
and the modern world do not ‗mix‘ as they are so different ―as cold/ And
passionate as the dawn‖
The Man and the Echo
 ―In a cleft that's christened Alt‖-this is a reference to a hill in Ireland that
is supposed to a burial ground for Celtics, Yeats was very interested in
Irish Mythology and probably dreamt/imagined himself in a such time

15.  In ‗Sailing to Byzantium‘ Yeats feels he no longer belongs in Ireland as
it has changed so much from what he knows ――that is not a country
for old men‖