Discuss Yeats' changing attitude to 'Romantic Ireland'

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Discuss Yeats’ changing attitude to ‘Romantic Ireland’

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave

(September 1913)

 

Discuss Yeats’ changing attitude to ‘Romantic Ireland’

 

It is one of the dualities in Yeats’ work that a poet renowned for the universal forlorn love lyric should be so inextricably bound to the particular identity, struggle and destiny of the Irish nation. However, on closer examination, Yeats’ poetic style proves that seeming paradox is easily explained when the true nature of Yeats’ idealism is taken into account. This essay shall argue the apparent political revolutionary commitment seen in the 1910’s was something of an aberration, in a transitional period of his career. To locate this transition, it is necessary to start at the beginning and end of his life, and work inwards, tracing the changing portrayal of Ireland in his verse.

 

The early Yeats was part of a strong Romantic tradition. Its liking for the emotional authenticity of folk-lore found a ready place in Yeats’ work, as he exploited the rich Irish mythological tradition: his long narrative works all date from this first stage. The first collection uses the ballad form frequently, and the simplicity of poems like ‘To An Isle in the Water’ – “shy one, shy one/ shy one of my heart / she moves in the firelight” – recalls traditional Irish poetry.

 

Perhaps archetypal of Yeats’ early romantic pieces is ‘To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time’. His treatment of Ireland and formal technique come together under the auspices of traditional Romanticism: he is unapologetic about drawing from “Old Eire and the ancient ways.” The poem is populated by mythic and shadowy figures from Ireland’s Gaelic past: the warrior-king Cuchulain, a druid, and Fergus, sometime King of Ulster. Despite coming from an Irish Protestant family, Yeats still paints Ireland as a Celtic idyll, and evokes it using traditional Romantic imagery – stars, the sea, woodlands, flowers. The use of the rose as a motif throughout his early work is indebted not only to the Order of the Golden Dawn, but to Blake in particular. Both shared a mystical tendency beyond Christianity echoed by Yeats’ own wish to be a seer-poet in the Irish tradition: the keeper of the narrative of identity.

 

Formally and technically, it shows the clear legacy of Romanticism too. The opening line, in solid iambic pentameter, runs as a stylized invocation – a common technique of traditional lyrical verse. The repetitions echo prayer, further intensifying the spiritual dimension of the piece. The vocabulary, whilst not necessarily archaic, is certainly that of traditional poetic diction: “thine”, “whereof”, “boughs.” There is a similar stylization in the syntax - “I would, before my time to go” – and personification of “eternal beauty wandering on her way.”

 

This phase of his poetry, known as the ‘Celtic twilight’ period, is rich in similar poems; their keynote being Irish themes and myth married to Romantic style and concerns such as unrequited love, heroism and mystical union with nature. Other pieces which use Irish mythology are “The Hosting of the Sidhe’, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, but the idea of a Celtic idyll (derived from the Romantic’s radical reshaping of pastoral idealism) runs throughout.

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This early work is a strong contrast to his final collections, some three or four decades later. It is impossible to characterise such an extensive body of poetry with few examples, but the progression is distinctive. His cultural frame of reference seems far wider, drawing on such diverse sources as: “a Quattrocento painter’s throng / A thoughtless image of Mantegna’s thought”to the famous symbolism of Byzantium, representing imaginative unity and the highest form of culture. Formally, the uniform elegiac tone of the early verse (broken only by simple ballads and refrains) is replaced by much greater variety. Yeats’ background ...

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