How effective is W.B Yeats in cautioning the modern reader on the melancholic, the frustrating and the falling elements in life, in his poems 'The Second Coming,' and 'A Prayer for My Daughter?'

Authors Avatar

Q.  How effective is W.B Yeats in cautioning the modern reader on the melancholic, the frustrating and the falling elements in life, in his poems ‘The Second Coming,’ and ‘A Prayer for My Daughter?’

A.       William Butler Yeats was a 20th Century poet.  Poets at that time focused on the background of man and war, and how war has taken away the youth and deterioration of man and humanity.  These poems also show how man has been reduced to a meaningless cause and how he has lost all the qualities of goodness and superiority.  There are many other writers and poets that concentrate on war.  One such writer that I have found is ‘Earnest Hemmingway’ who was a soldier in the Second World War and he presented his experience in the novel which he titled ‘Farewell to Arms.’  The novel presents the horrors of war and humans inability to lead a normal and meaningful life.  Other such writers and poets which deal with the various elements which have contributed in making mankind dignified are John Osborne, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Elliott and so on.  Coming back to these poems, the author William Butler Yeats married late in life, in 1917, when he was 52 years old.  His marriage marked a crucial turn in his life, not so much because he had married the woman of his dreams - that was Maud Gonne, and she had rejected him enough times by 1917 that he knew he would never achieve his dream of marrying her - but more because the marriage brought Yeats into a different relation to the world:  he now was a man of family, and when his first child, a daughter, was born to him in 1919 he knew that his sense of himself and his role in the world had altered forever.

         At this stage William Butler Yeats was already consumed with the greatest fear a parent can feel which is the fear of a child's death.  From research I found that Lady Gregory who was his dearest friend, had in 1918, learned that her only son, Robert, had been killed in World War I.   The fear of being unable to protect one's own child haunted him when his own daughter, Anne, was born in 1919, and that’s why he wrote “A Prayer for My Daughter.”  The poem basically is dedicated to the birth of the poet's daughter in 1919.  The poem also helps to recognize the irony of the child's birth at a time when civilization had come close to negating everything that is good. The poems, contains simplicity of style which marks the genuine feeling of the poet.

        “The Second Coming” is another poem written by William Butler Yeats in 1921.  The poems holds a number of basic themes which can help to compare with ‘A Prayer form my Daughter.’  Which contains just a few.  The themes of this poem bring out man’s distance from God, materialism, man going the wrong direction, man trying to appeal to the conscience, disintegration of society and also man moving away from God by turning his back on him as well as other indirect themes.  In this poem though Yeats does not refer to the war in the poem, the imagery and the time of writing, which was in 1919, invites such a reading. At a more general level Yeats is also expressing his feelings about the fate of modern civilization.  The poem expresses the sense that the war was somehow almost apocalyptic, such was its horror and destructiveness.  This poem depicts the world as a turning and turning gyre, which is represented in the very first few lines of the poem.  The turn is catalyzed by anarchy and the worst, and is turned from the innocence and the best.  The poem uses a lot of allusion and metaphor to show that the ending of one good thing supposes the beginning of another good thing, and the new era will come soon from the ground up.  The poem also uses a lot of repetition to show the author’s optimistic tone toward the change.  However, I feel that the concepts in the poem are too abstract and have not been explained explicitly and haven’t been brought out very realistically.  For example, what is the turning, what is the old era, and what is the new era the speaker is looking for, etc.  They leave a question mark in the minds of the readers.  Overall all the methods used in the poem can only provide some hint for it.

Join now!

        As the poem ‘A Prayer for My Daughter,’ is focused on Yeats’ daughter basically, the first stanza - ’Once more… is in my mind’ – brings out the feeling that Yeats is expressing great anxiety over the frail protection, the mere "cradle-hood and coverlid," that can only half-hide his frail infant.  After that message conveyed we come across the howling wind that comes from the sea itself threatens her security, and the poet has paced and prayed into the night for some protection for her.  Yeats also mentions the word gloom, which I feel implies the storm of chaos, disappointment, ...

This is a preview of the whole essay