William Butler Yeats - Easter (a poem with videos and biography)

William Butler Yeats

Easter, 1916

by William Butler Yeats 1865–1939

I have met them at close of day   

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey   

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head   

Or polite meaningless words,   

Or have lingered awhile and said   

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done   

Of a mocking tale or a gibe   

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,   

Being certain that they and I   

But lived where motley is worn:   

All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent   

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers   

When, young and beautiful,   

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school   

And rode our wingèd horse;   

This other his helper and friend   

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,   

So sensitive his nature seemed,   

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,   

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,   

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone   

Through summer and winter seem   

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,   

The rider, the birds that range   

From cloud to tumbling cloud,   

Minute by minute they change;   

A shadow of cloud on the stream   

Changes minute by minute;   

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   

And a horse plashes within it;   

The long-legged moor-hens dive,   

And hens to moor-cocks call;   

Minute by minute they live:   

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.   

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part   

To murmur name upon name,   

As a mother names her child   

When sleep at last has come   

On limbs that had run wild.   

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;   

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith   

For all that is done and said.   

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;   

And what if excess of love   

Bewildered them till they died?   

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride   

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

FOOTNOTES: September 25, 1916

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

William Butler Yeats photographed
in 1903 by Alice Boughton

Biography - Poetry Foundation

Biography - Wikipedia

"Easter 1916," by W.B. Yeats

Irish Poetry

W.B.Yeats Reading His Own Verse

Yeats made these recordings for the wireless in 1932, 1934 and

the last on 28 October 1937 when he was 72. He died on

 January 28 1939. The photograph shows him sitting before

the microphone in 1937.

Radio Documentary on W.B. Yeats and Politics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN2x6DSWgjo

William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

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


William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939



Biographical References

Biography -  by Poemhunter

Biography - by Wikipedia



Supplemental Notes
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

The Second Coming was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the first World War. The above version of the poem is as it was published in the edition of Michael Robartes and the Dancer dated 1920 (there are numerous other versions of the poem). The preface and notes in the book contain some philosophy attributed to Robartes.

 

This printing of the poem has a page break between lines 17 and 18 making the stanza division unclear. Following the two most similar drafts given in the Parkinson and Brannen edited edition of the manuscripts, I have put a stanza break there. (Interestingly, both of those drafts have thirty centuries instead of twenty.) The earlier drafts also have references to the French and Irish Revolutions as well as to Germany and Russia.

 

Several of the lines in the version above differ from those found in subsequent versions. In listing it as one of the hundred most anthologized poems in the English language, the text given by Harmon (1998) has changes including: line 13 (": somewhere in sands of the desert"), line 17 ("Reel" instead of "Wind"), and no break between the second and third stanza.
 

• Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Chruchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: The Chuala Press, 1920. (as found in the photo-lithography edition printed Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970)
• Yeats, William Butler. "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
• Harmon, William, ed. The Classic Hundred Poems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

* * * * * * * * * *

Summary by SparkNotes
http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/yeats/section5.rhtml

The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”

 

Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

 

Form

 

“The Second Coming” is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”

 

Commentary

 

Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem. This brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly complicated; but the question of what it should signify to a reader is another story entirely.

 

Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that he described in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system. The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance—except for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development).

 

“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own notes:

The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre...

In other words, the world’s trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy, and heterogeneity is now coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner gyre—which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the science and democracy of the outer gyre. The “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.

 

This seems quite silly as philosophy or prophecy (particularly in light of the fact that it has not come true as yet). But as poetry, and understood more broadly than as a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of A Vision, “The Second Coming” is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. The poem may not have the thematic relevance of Yeats’s best work, and may not be a poem with which many people can personally identify; but the aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to ensure its value and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.


 

William Butler Yeats - Brown Penny

I WHISPERED, 'I am too young.'

And then, 'I am old enough';

Wherefore I threw a penny

To find out if I might love.

'Go and love, go and love, young man,

If the lady be young and fair.'

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,

There is nobody wise enough

To find out all that is in it,

For he would be thinking of love

Till the stars had run away

And the shadows eaten the moon.

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

One cannot begin it too soon.


William Butler Yeats, 1910



Biographical References

Biography -  by Poemhunter

Biography - by Wikipedia



Analyses of Poem


FIRST ANALYSIS

by DC Aries

http://www.humanities360.com/index.php/poetry-analysis-brown-penny-by-william-butler-yeats-2-11904/

 

William Butler Yeats was a writer of Irish and British descent. He was born in Ireland in 1865. He went on to become an accomplished poet and won the Nobel Prize for poetry. The poem, “Brown Penny“  was published in 1910 and appeared in a volume of poetry entitled, The Green Helmet and Other Poems. The theme of Brown Penny focused on romantic relationships and what it really means to fall in love. The poem opens with the lines,

 

I whispered, ‘I am too young,’

And then, ‘I am old enough’;

Wherefore I threw a penny

To find out if I might love.

 

Yeats writes about a young man who is questioning whether or not he is at an age where he can truly appreciate and experience love. He has conflicting feelings about it so he throws a penny in hopes of finding an answer. The remaining lines of the stanza include the answer.

 

‘Go and love, go and love, young man,

If the lady be young and fair.’

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

I am looped in the loops of her hair.

 

The answer the young may gets its that if she is the right woman, he will find love with her. The answer disregards age and explains that when its with the right person, anyone can love. The man then professes his love by stating, “I am looped in the loops of her hair.” 

 

In the second half of the poem Yeats writes,

 

O love is the crooked thing,

There is nobody wise enough

To find out all that is in it,

For he would be thinking of love

Till the stars had run away

And the shadows eaten the moon.

Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,

One cannot begin it too soon.

 

In this stanza, the man continues his conversation with the penny and comes to the realization that nobody can ever truly understand love or “all that is in it.” There is too much to explore and to know everything there is to know about love a man would have to think “Till the stars had run away/And the shadows eaten the moon.” Therefore, he concludes that no one is too young or too old to love because it takes more than a lifetime to understand.

 

A poetry element Yeats really works with in this poem is diction. His word choice is creative and unique. This is a conflict within himself, but he uses “brown penny,” as someone to converse with.  The choice of using a penny is appropriate. By flipping the penny, he is taking a chance. There is also a fair amount of repetition. “brown penny” is repeated over and over and adds to the flow of the poem. “Go and love,” is also repeated several times, to show that it is an important line. “Looped in the loops of her hair,” is a great line that uses the word “loop” as two different meanings. Looped means entangled in this woman and also describes strands of her hair. Loop can also refer to the uncertainty in love. This is another way of expressing his affection for the woman. He shows more creativity in the second stanza with the lines, “Till the stars had run away/And the shadows eaten the moon.” This is an unusual phrase that most readers won’t have heard before, but still, in the context of the poem, the readers will understand what Yeats is saying.

 

The major symbol in this poem is the “brown penny.” To find out whether or not he is in love, the man  flips a penny. He takes a chance. This is what love is all about. Individuals take a chance when they commit or fall in love with someone. They don’t know how its going to end and they risk their heart and their lives for the sake of love. As with flipping a penny, the young man doesn’t know how it will land or what the future holds. But he risks it for love.

 

“Brown Penny” was an unique, yet honest poem by Yeats. Unlike many love poems throughout history, it wasn’t boring or generic. It used the right amount of diction, repetition and symbolism to capture the meaning. Yeats showed the emotion of young love in an effective way. “Brown Penny” was an incredible poem by a talented man.

 

 

* * * * * * *

 

SECOND ANALYSIS

by Raina Lorring

http://www.humanities360.com/index.php/poetry-analysis-brown-penny-by-william-butler-yeats-11802/

 

Poetry is meant to be heard. Readers can not get the full effect of many works if they simple read the piece to themselves. This is why many poetry lovers find it helpful to read the works out loud and poetry readings are still popular. The poem “Brown Penny” by William Butler Yeats is meant to heard and read. The poet was born in Dublin in 1865. He stood out among other poets of his period, who used a free verse style,  because he wrote lyrical poetry. “Brown Penny” is more of a love song than a poem.

 

The “penny” is an important symbol in the poem. In the culture in which Yeats grew up, the “penny” is a symbol for love for commoners. The reason for this is because love is something that is priceless. A common tradition of the period was to have a “Penny Wedding”, where guest were expected to bring their own food.

 

Yeats also uses the “penny” to show that he is taking a chance on love. This is apparent since a “penny” is currency and invokes the image of gambling. This can be seen in the line, “Wherefore I threw a penny.” This line can also be symbol for wishing for love because the act of trowing a “penny” down a well has been a long standing tradition of making a wish.

 

The style of the poem is almost a whirling dance with words. Yeats skillfully wrote a poem that comes to life when the audience hears the piece as it was meant to be heard, in song. The speaker in the poem is “looped” in his lovers hair. This word gives the image of the dance and also shows how the speaker is bound to his lover.

 

Yeats shows how much lovers can clash with the lines: “O love is the crooked thing, / There is nobody wise enough / To find out all that is in it.” Love is a struggle of give and take.

 

“Brown Penny” also shows how as difficult love can be, it is not something that can ever be escaped. Yeats says that the speaker “would be thinking of love / Till the stars had run away / And the shadows eaten the moon.” These lines mean that love is not only a struggle but an eternal one.

 

Love is a dance and poem is meant to be heard. The skillful words of “Brown Penny” need a voice to give them life. Yeats understood this and captures the conflicting emotions of love in his poem “Brown Penny.”

 

 

* * * * * * *

 

THIRD ANALYSIS

by Milton Johanides

http://www.humanities360.com/index.php/what-is-the-meaning-of-yeats-poem-brown-penny-8884/

 

Brown Penny by W B Yeats is a short poem written in 1910 and deals in a lighthearted way with the serious business of a young man considering falling in love. The young man, perhaps Yeats himself, tosses a coin, the brown penny, to see if he is old enough to love. In an age wrought with superstitions such an action may not have sounded as amusing as it does today. Victorian Britain was a society which took seriously the behavior of ordinary objects, hence all the wedding traditions we are still familiar with, such as dressing in white, wearing a veil, having something borrowed, something blue, etc. The Victorians even had a theory about the type of marriage a couple would enjoy depending on the colour of the bride´s dress, the day of the wedding and even the state of the weather. So Yeats is, perhaps tongue in cheek, borrowing from this culture to determine his own fate.

 

The coin encourages him to “go and love” especially if the lady “be young and fair.” The last line of the first verse “looped in the loops of the hair” suggests the looping of the coin as it travels through the air as well as drawing on an image favoured by Yeats of being draped in the hair of his loved one, as in “He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace” (line 10: and your hair fall over my breast).

 

In contrast to the lightheartedness of the first verse, the second introduces a feeling of frustration at the immense power of love and its ability to deceive. “Love is the crooked thing” he says, in other words something that twists and turns, not in lovely loops like a girl´s long hair, but in an unpredictable way that can confuse. “Crooked” of course also implies dishonesty, even illegal activity, so love is very much on the wrong side of the tracks in this verse. Yeats has made it an enemy, testing his wisdom.  “There is nobody wise enough to find all that is in it,” is a despairing line, commenting on the immensity of the task facing a young man encountering romance for the first time. Today, love is perhaps a more transient thing, experienced easily and quickly abandoned if it fails, but in Yeats´ time, when propriety mattered and behaviour was governed by religious beliefs, individuals had to think very carefully before entering a relationship, taking into careful consideration not only the possible uncomfortable results of difficult romance, but also what other people thought. Falling in love promised a minefield of adverse social consequences.

 

But it is not the social environment that concerns Yeats here, it is the enigmatic quality of love that baffles him. The world would end, he says, before anyone, no matter how wise, could understand it. Using the stars and the moon in this context is deliberately invoking the imagery of the romantic poets of an earlier century, but giving it a more morbid twist.

 

Still, far from putting off the young man, the size of the task before him only encourages him further. “One cannot begin it too soon” brings the poem back to its lighthearted beginning and leaves the reader with a wry smile. This is the fate of all mankind, that no matter how insurmountable the odds of finding true love are, we each of us attempt it, time and time again. Given the unfathomable nature of the exercise, tossing a brown penny has as much chance of bringing us success as anything else.