Time travelling and W.B. Yeats: to Infinity and Beyond

The real world that Yeats lived in was often the subject of his poetry.  He did not shy away from discussing personal events in his life and even named names of those he knew and loved,  immortalising them forever in verse.   However, he was not bound to this ‘real world’ for inspiration.   He could be transported to another reality in his poetry, and the act of travelling through time and space is often the very theme which so attracted Yeats.

Yeats uses the tension between the real world in which he lived and the ideal world of his imagination, to create drama in his poetry.  In the poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, the speaker describes a real island in Sligo and colours it for us in a  glimmering ‘purple glow’.  He tantalises our senses with details of ‘the lake water -lapping with low-sounds’ and the delicate music of crickets singing.  It’s an ideal world, a paradise of tranquility, where ‘peace comes dropping slow’.  It seems a very real place indeed.  The poet’s opening refrain, and the repetition of the words, ‘go’ and ‘there’, only serve to increase the sense of urgency and arouse the reader’s desire to make the journey to Innisfree too.  



However, the drama comes to a climax when we realise, at the penultimate line, that the speaker is far away from the land of his heart’s desire and is not really seeing the island.  It is an imagined, ideal world.  The contrast could not be more startling when he says, ‘While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey...’  Only now, does it become clear to the reader, that the journey being undertaken by the speaker, is one of the imagination, creating a sense of anti-climax and disappointment.  The use of the colour detail here, or the lack of it,  is in stark contrast to the purple hues of the second stanza.  By juxtaposing the two landscapes in this way, Yeats creates dramatic tension between the real world of the city, where the speaker actually is,  the imagined, ideal, world of Innisfree, where he would like to be.  

‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is another poem whose theme deals with the notion of escape and travel through the world of the imagination.  However, here Yeats creates dramatic tension by contrasting the world of mortal men; the real world, with that of the world of art; the  ideal world of the imagination, primarily through his use of opposing imagery. In this poem, the real world of nature no longer  satisfies the speaker, and instead he seeks solace and immortality in the world of art.  The image of the singing birds of line two and three, ‘at their song’, is maligned by the fact that it is merely singing for ‘those dying generations’, a pointless activity.  In doing so, Yeats highlights the tragic flaw of the real world: everything that lives, must die.  

He describes an old person as ‘ a tattered coat upon a stick’, a brutal image indeed, and his own soul as a thing, ‘sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal’.  This bleak, anti-Christian idea graphically illustrates Yeats’s dislike for the real world at this point in his life.  Instead, he seeks an alternative, ideal world, where immortality is guaranteed.  The ideal, imagined world that the speaker chooses is the world of Grecian art: ‘such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make...’.  


He imagines being re-born as a beautifully crafted, golden automaton, ‘set upon a golden bough to sing’.  This is in stark contrast to the real singing bird of the opening stanza.   These opposing, yet linked, ornithological images serve to highlight the tension in Yeats poetry between the real world in which he lives, and an ideal world that he imagines.

By Michelle Burrowes

Rest Easy Mr Yeats - The Faeries are Here to Stay

I'll always be grateful to W.B. Yeats for his beautiful faery poems, but there are some who feel they simply resulted in the whole leprechaun-isation of Irish identity and culture.  But I, for one, stand up for small people and take delight in the stories and poems that entice us to dream and imagine another world living alongside our own.

If British culture can celebrate a Tolkien, pint-sized, Hobbit and turn him into a global phenomenon, then why can't we?  It seems that people like' little folk', be they Borrowers, Lilliputians or just regular, garden variety, garden gnomes.
So, while Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the other members of the Irish Literary Revival,  were trying desperately to establish a separate, unique, Irish cultural identity, vastly different and unique from that of the 'British oppressors',' it seems, in the end, that faeries and elves don't just belong to the Irish, but indeed, are beloved the entire world over.

But who are we kidding, Yeats had stylistically  more in common with  Hardy and Wordsworth and the other Major English poets, than ever he had with the old traditional Irish bards who wrote in their native tongue.  Yet, the new, fledgling Irish nation took him to their hearts, faeries and all, and made him an Irish icon.  As any student of poetry can tell you, there is more to Yeats than faeries and none who could so skilfully string a line of poetry together and make the words dance and sing.  Their love of word-smith Willie Yeats goes far deeper than that.
And so, while we await in anticipation for the completion of Peter Jackson's adaptation of Tolkien's classic, 'The Hobbit', we cannot but smile and think with confidence that the 'little people' are here to stay and W.B. Yeats can rest easy in his Sligo bed.

I was reminded of W.B. Yeats's poem, 'The Stolen Child', when I stopped to take this photo last week in Donegal.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.