Miss Morey

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Youssef Latash

Through his portrayal of the human experience, Yeats poetry reinforces the signicance of desire. How does your interpretation of Yeats poetry support this view? The human experience, the physical, emotional and spiritual elements of life, is inextricably linked with the multifaceted notion of desire. Indeed, desire, as one of the most powerful elements of human emotion, gures as a fundamental concern in Yeats life and his poetry. His poetry, ranging over several decades, ideological movements and poetic forms, can be seen as a personal quest to consummate his desires. His early poems circle obsessively around desire and its objects. They depict a kind of desire that cannot be satised, but feeds off its frustration and exceeds it objects. His later poems, on the other hand, depict desire as an eternal, disembodied force that sweeps over humanity and possesses and enduring relevance. From the simple, primal desire for love and companionship expressed in When You Are Old to the intrinsic desire to understand the universe in a philosophical sense developed in Leda and the Swan, Yeats poetry reinforces the signicance of desire as a driving force in human behavior. However, a constant, unwavering desire which stems throughout all his poetry, is the desire to nd and create beauty in the world. Indeed, it is the emotional intensity with which he writes while communicating abstract ideas together with his ability to encompass the romantic lyricism of the 19th century with the modernism of the 20th century are this poets most appealing features. Much of Yeats poetry explores the notion of desire in its most simple, yet most powerful form - the desire in each one of us to express and receive love, in all its manifestations. Of all the forces of human emotion, the most powerful, in terms of its ability to bring both beatic satisfaction as well as the deepest despair to ones life, is love. Indeed, it is the fulllment or frustration of this desire which brings the former or the latter. Yeats When You Are Old, written in the conventions of traditional, lyrical poetry, reveals his desire to express his love for Maude Gonne while projecting an image of his beloved into a future in which his love for her was unreciprocated. From the rst line of the poem, there is an intimacy born which is conveyed in the direct address to the beloved When you are old. Here, the long, vowel sounds give it a sense of warmth. In establishing his desire and love for her, he praises the soft look [her] eyes had once, and of their shadows deep, their ability to draw people into them. Indeed, the future is only imagined; she still possesses her beauty and her moments of glad grace. However, while some loved her beauty with love false or true he loved the pilgrim soul and the sorrows of [her] changing face. While the repetition of love here emphasizes this notion as a central concern of the poem, it is the contrast between the types of love, others shallow infatuation with his spiritual connection, which emphasizes the authenticity of his desire and love for her. Despite this, his desire is not consummated with her mutual compassion; she failed to recognize and reciprocate it and as a result, Love was personied so he could [hide] his face amid a crowd of stars. The sense of rejection and humiliation that is seen in this image conveys the impact of an unfullled desire on an individual. Indeed, Yeats begs the question of whether a love which is spiritually real but physically frustrating is enough for him as an individual, a question which resonates again in both his early and late poetry. This frustration made his heart sore in other early poems like Wild Swans at Coole, and managed to resonate even through his late modernist poetry like Among School Children, where that colour upon cheek or hair drove his heart...wild. His ability to communicate this all-encompassing notion of desire for another in distinct literary forms, in Romantic lyricism and Modernist poetry, is one of this poets most compelling features. Thus, Yeats emphasizes the signicance of our desire for love, to express it and receive it,

Miss Morey

Advanced English!

Youssef Latash

as a driving force in human behaviour such that it coloured so much of his poetry which spans over several decades and literary genres. For Yeats, and all of us to some extent, there is a desire to sense a spiritual depth and mystery in the universe and, beyond this, an ultimate sense of cohesion and meaning. Yeats desire for this is demonstrated in his inability to accept the disillusionment and nihilism that was synonymous with the growing modernist movement of his context and is communicated through Leda and the Swan, as he attempts to satisfy his ontological musings. Yeats strategy in communicating this desire in Leda and the Swan is by focusing on the human perception of an act beyond human understanding, then expanding the poems perspective to the philosophical and spiritual. The sonnet begins with a sudden blow as Zeus enters in the form of a swan, grasping the staggering and helpless girl as he begins to rape her. The emotive language which describes Ledas experience grants us, as responders, powers of empathy with Ledas physical and psychological landscape while creating a mood of aggressive intensity. Yeats shift into the second stanza also shifts the focus of the poem from the helplessness of Leda to a more detached, but still, at this point, human level. Yeats asks How could those terried vague ngers push/The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? The use of the interrogative to describe Ledas condition adds a dimension of ambivalence; that while resistance on her part was impossible, perhaps she, too, found the god irresistible. Indeed, this implication is by virtue of Yeats specic word choice, whereby Ledas thighs are described as not being pried apart but as loosening. However, as Yeats enters the sestet, he abandons the human experience of Leda, the present tense and immediacy of the preceding octave to distance the reader and speculate the signicance of the rape, posing the question Did she put on his knowledge with his power. Yeats wonders if, in the synthesis of these antithetical forces, the spiritual and physical, a seraphic entity (Zeus) with a mortal host (Leda), these antitheses were reconciled. In this poem Yeats works towards satisfying his desire for meaning, implying that the universe is made up of opposites which are in constant interaction and harmony, providing the grounds for his concluding emphasis in Among School Children that we cannot distinguish the dancer from the dance. As we contemplate notions of good and evil, two opposing forces, in the universe and in our own lives, we realize their coexistence, that we cannot separate them, because to do so would render both meaningless. Thus, in our own ways, each one of us can validate notions expressed by Yeats. Indeed, while we may also disagree with Yeats speculations, the emotional intensity with which he communicates his desire to understand our universe as part of the human experience is one of the poets most appealing features. The desire to nd and create beauty in the world is one of the most powerful forces acting on Yeats. Indeed, Yeats poetry becomes the medium through which Yeats consolidates this desire. Just as works of art and musical compositions have the capacity to be beautiful, so too can words carry the same, if not more powerful, beauty and this notion underpins all of Yeats poetry. In Leda and the Swan, despite being, ostensibly, the brutal rape of a woman by a Swan, the powerful images together with the aesthetic quality of the sounds created by Yeats specic word choice conveys compelling beauty for the reader. Leda, for example, has her thighs caressed by the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill while the swan holds her helpless breast upon his breast. While we pity Ledas predicament, the beauty conveyed through vivid imagery adds a unique dimension to Yeats poetry. Despite the modernist inuences on this poem, through the evocative imagery used to describe the Swan, the feathered glory with its great wings beating still, Yeats maintains the Swan as a symbol of beauty and thus intensies majesty of the Swan. Other poems, like When You Are Old are more obviously to do with the capturing and pursuit of beauty. The poems subject, the beloved, possesses all the elements of beauty

Miss Morey

Advanced English!

Youssef Latash

in an individual. That is to say, she enjoys a soft look in her eyes, moments of glad grace and a beauty which had the capacity to instigate love false or true. Even in The Second Coming, which essentially describes a world of chaos and disorder, traditionally notions which are diametrically opposed to beauty, Yeats manages to create beauty through the sheer power of the images he describes. Indeed, he describes a beast with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,/Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it/Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. In critiquing the desire to satisfy his emotional hunger with the implications of desire being unfullled explored in When You Are Old, examining the desire to nd spiritual depth and meaning in the universe in Leda and the Swan and exploring the desire for beauty which is subsumed into all of his poetry, it is clear how Yeats reinforces the signicance of desire as a driving force in human behaviour. Indeed, it is the emotional intensity with which he writes while communicating abstract ideas together with his ability to encompass the romantic lyricism of the 19th century with the modernism of the 20th century are this poets most appealing features.