Content Introduction main part. I. William Butler Yeats and his biography I. Writing style

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

This lyric poem composed of three quatrains (four lines each) details the speaker's desire to escape urban London and seclude himself on the small uninhabited island of Innisfree, in Lough Gill in the County of Sligo in Ireland. The composition of this poem was based on the poem "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau, where the speaker isolates himself and immerses himself in nature on the banks of Walden pond. Yeats' father frequently read this poem to him when he was younger, and he often escaped to his island with a friend while growing up. There is a longing in this poem for peace and tranquility, seen especially in lines eleven and twelve when he says "While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey/ I hear it in the deep heart's core." The rhyme scheme is a clean abab cdcd efef, giving it the lyrical and musical quality it possesses. The imagery of the honey bees, the garden, the sound of wings and crickets, the purple glow of the moon, provides the same desired feeling of tranquility for the reader as it does the speaker of the poem. It is not difficult to relate to the feeling of wanting to escape to nature, making this poem all the more effective for the reader.
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;

How many loved your moments of glad grace, ₅

And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled ₁₀
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

When You Are Old

For such a short poem, Yeats instilled great meaning in the twelve lines. Composed of three stanzas, Yeats' diction changes from the first to the third stanza. In the first, we have a feeling of comfort, as an elderly woman sits sleepily in front of her fire. The speaker asks her to read this poem to reminisce on the days of her youth. The second stanza becomes less comfortable, but still nostalgic, as he asks her to distinguish between those that falsely claimed to love her for her beauty and the speaker, who remained the only one to love her for who she truly was, despite her aging ("And loved the sorrows of your changing face"). The final stanza evokes a feeling of loss and regret, as the speaker makes it clear that he waited for her but eventually got lost "amid a crowd of stars".
The purpose of the speaker in this poem could be one of two things: he could be hoping to instill regret in the elderly woman for not choosing the man that truly loved her in her youth, OR he could be speaking to the woman in her youth, trying to convince her to not let her life end in regret by not choosing him at that time. Regardless, it is a truly romantic poem despite the melancholy ending.
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 ₅
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. ₁₀
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, ₁₅
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind 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, ₂₀
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?