"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations
"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy
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"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
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Showing posts with label William Butler Yeats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Butler Yeats. Show all posts
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?
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.
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.
‘The Second Coming’ is WB Yeats’s most quoted poem – and almost certainly the most widely quoted poem of the last hundred years. Its prediction of the savage birth of the modern era recently celebrated its one hundredth birthday following the poem’s first publication in 1920. Ever since, its slouching rough beast has cast a shadow across the century.
Even now literary scholarship struggles to deal with such a phenomenon. In the midst of a pandemic, attention has focussed more on when Yeats wrote the poem, January 1919, amid the first stirrings of the Irish War of Independence and (as outlined in Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (2019)) the raging Spanish flu epidemic, his wife dangerously sick and eight months pregnant with a child the spirits had promised would be a (male) avatar of a new age. When unexpectedly a daughter arrived, the spirits (indignantly questioned in sessions of automatic writing piloted by Yeats’s wife George) hastily avowed her to be the reincarnation of a distant ancestor named Anne Yeats. Named Anne after that ancestor, the child was no avatar, but became one of Ireland’s most underrated artists. Historically speaking, predicting a Second Coming is a risky business: somehow you nearly always get it wrong, at least in terms of timing. Sadly, as advent prophecies go, the spirits’ avatar promise has proved less accurate than the poem’s grim forecast of a century’s violent birth.
A less-regarded tendency of modern scholarship highlights the poem’s actual advent, its birthday publication November 1920 in The Dial, an American literary monthly requisitioned earlier that year by James Sibley Watson and Scofield Thayer as a forum for radical new poetry. Printing friends like e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, the magazine would see the first American appearance of TS Eliot’s apocalyptic The Waste Land, and the poet Marianne Moore in the editor’s chair. (These high points were short-lived: by the decade’s end the magazine was shuttered and Thayer institutionalized, afflicted by the kind of paranoid schizophrenia Yeats’s poem seems to anticipate, his astonishing art collection left to the Met.) By publishing there Yeats was keeping company with the vanguard of American modernism, affirming him no longer a minor Victorian lyric poet or unsuccessful Irish playwright, but undeniably a contemporary voice. Though no others from the group of poems he offered to The Dial made a similar leap into super stardom, poems like ‘Towards Break of Day’, ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ and ‘Demon and Beast’ reveal similar dream-like preoccupations with elemental creatures: dragons, stags, and sphinxes.
Political readings are tempting, too, especially given Yeats’s later drift into authoritarian politics. Certainly the poem cuts athwart a Whiggish view of history as progress, yet with all references to the Russian Revolution and the Irish Troubles purged from the drafts, its vision, however troubling, is impossible to align with any particular creed, from Marxism or fascism to ecocriticism: the climbing hooks of critics slide off. ‘The Second Coming’ works because of what it leaves out, going beyond the particular circumstances of its composition, political context, and publication. It is the poem above all that makes axiomatic the idea that literature can outdistance its origins, that readers are the ones who create meaning: as WH Auden put it in his ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’, ‘The words of a dead man | Are modified in the guts of the living’. ‘The Second Coming’, as used and re-used over and over again in the intervening hundred years, is a poem so modified in the guts of the living it tells the history of the century. Resonant phrases are borrowed as book titles (Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen), added to songs by Lou Reed and Joni Mitchell, and quoted by figures as diverse as Slavoj Žižek and George W. Bush. In fact the poem is invoked by a succession of American presidents (or their speechwriters) from John F Kennedy to the incoming Joe Biden. (Finding 22 lines of taut verse outside his tweet-addled experience, the White House’s outgoing occupant has instead the distinction that from 2016 his ubiquity has helped cause an exponential rise in the poem’s world-wide use).
‘The Second Coming’ in popular culture: image courtesy of Neil Mann
This is a poem which through the endless crises of world wars and late capitalism, through potential nuclear or environmental cataclysm, keeps on telling the story of the century. Rather than laboriously note each use, it makes sense to ask why it so often rhymes with the times. ‘Literature is news that stays news’ said Ezra Pound: that’s its job. The question is, why has this piece stayed news? Partly it is our fault. As Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse (2020) acutely observes:
We are alive at a time of worst case scenarios […]. Look: there are fascists in the streets, and in the palaces. Look: the weather has gone uncanny, volatile, malevolent.
Such is the modern condition; every succeeding age is or considers itself uniquely damned. Even then, plenty of powerful expressions of twentieth-century angst have not had such purchase. Paul Valéry’s ‘La Crise de l’Esprit’ (‘Crisis of the Mind’, 1919), like ‘The Second Coming’, laments that ‘the illusion of a European culture has been lost, and knowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatsoever’ – just right, for instance, to introduce a journal issue Christine Reynier and I co-edited on non-fiction narratives of war and peace. What about ‘The Second Coming’ makes it different?
The obvious answer is that it is a poem. Poems do things differently. As O’Connell also says, ‘Listen. Attune your ear to the general discord’. And this, it seems to me, is what Yeats’s poem makes us do. It forces us, whether we know it or not, to listen to discordant times. To understand how, it might be better not to treat the poem as a compilation of quotable extracts, but instead try again to attune to what is poetic about it, what makes it stick in our collective inner ear.
This is a tricky task – even for such a short poem. This brief attempt focuses on just four talismanic words, pivots about which the poem turns: gyre, mere, surely, hour. There are a hundred and more patterns to be picked out, but attending to these words and their resonances might help map the poem’s contours.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre 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 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?
Amid the opening’s obsessive mounting repeats, turning and turning, falcon and falconer, this strange word gyre sticks out: for most of us to recall its correct pronunciation (hard g, to rhyme with wire), never mind its meaning, is a struggle. To thrust into the very first line this old, rare word for a spiral, circular turn, or vortex, opens a disorienting world, where all that is familiar becomes unfamiliar.
Interlocking gyres from WB Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1921)
The poem’s first readers could not have known the elaborate philosophical system behind Yeats’s choice of word. Essentially it involved two kinds of movements, of polar opposites and cycles, producing a dynamic of two interpenetrating cones or gyres, tracking movements of historical recurrence and change – and a whole lot of confusing drawings. They did though have a chance of half-recalling, as few do now, how the history of the term implies violence.
Some maybe remembered its use in steepling cumulation (‘wave on wave and gyre on gyre’) by Yeats’s mentor WE Henley, from a collection belligerently titled Song of the Sword. Yeats himself may have first encountered the word when it sings a similar song of a sword in Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene, a poem with which he grew up, and edited for publication thirteen years before the appearance of ‘The Second Coming’. In Spenser’s Book II Canto V, a lesson in moderation and ‘temperaunce’ is dished out to an errant knight called Pyrrochles. Guyon bests him in battle because he can’t control his temper, or his sword: he ‘is full of such ire’ he cannot wield it with
his approued skill, to ward, Or strike, or hurtle rownd in warlike gyre
In other words Pyrrochles is unable to manoeuvre his sword in the tight violent circles (each a gyre) of his training. Instead he ‘rudely rag’d like a cruel tiger’, less man than animal It is hard not to see echoes in ‘The Second Coming’, in which rational man gives way to raging beast: especially as in Spenser gyre suggests a strange combination of violence and control – just right, in other words, for a poem of the same bloodline. Because although ‘Things fall apart’, and like the unreckonable falcon go out of control, this is a poem of controlled violence.
Spiralling gyre from WB Yeats, A Vision (1937)
The controlled violence of ‘The Second Coming’ can be heard when turning from gyre, an arcane word, to a more familiar word used arcanely: mere. Mere does not in its modern offhand usage belittle the anarchy it modifies: it is employed here in its older alchemical sense to mean something pure, unadulterated. Mereanarchy is thus fused together like those yoked opposites that punctuate Yeats’s poems of this period (every Irish schoolchild knows ‘Easter 1916’ and its ‘terrible beauty’; Allen Ginsberg prizes ‘the murderous innocence of the sea’ from ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’, written just after ‘The Second Coming’). If anarchy should denote complete disorder (to Yeats, who had studied alchemy’s purifications) mere anarchy suggests something distilled, focussed, even directed. As the poem seems to know, maybe mere anarchy is the product of some ordering principle, which makes it that much more malevolent.
The poem reveals, in other words, an order, a twisted logic behind the apparent disorder of the contemporary world – and of its own working. The poem divulges this without troubling to assemble the familiar pattern of words in rhyming pairs at the end of each line. The opening hints at off-rhymes and half-rhymes (for instance hold and world) have, unusually for Yeats, by the end entirely disintegrated. For a poem like this, maybe, end-rhymes are too neat, too pat for the depiction of such an apocalyptic scene.
Yet there are patterns to be found. Words beginning lines have important roles too. So gyre and mere are matched closer in sound than nearer end-rhyme candidates like falconer. Joining these with hear, everywhere and Are discloses a connecting thread just about holding together the disconnected aphoristic clauses of the poem’s opening. All these words turn (however merely or slightly) towards an r sound. As a consequence, minds gyre and mere contain comparable diphthongs (mere in some pronunciations or accents), altering the shape of each vowel as it is uttered. Together they inaugurate a sequence gyre, mere, surely, hour, where the overtones of each vowel follow an arc upwards and then turn successively lower and darker in grim succession. Something of the poem’s meaning is being enacted in sound (as can be heard in Ted Hughes’s powerful reading of the poem).
Surely marks the moment the reasonable first part – featuring the bitter observations which everyone always quotes – gives way to a second part of quite different tone: Helen Vendler calls it ‘oracular’. Surely does keep up the sonic sequence, forming a similar noise before its second syllable changes direction, but it sounds now like a voice is addressing us, enjoining the reader to share in the speaker’s prophetic vision. When for good measure surely repeats on the next line it sounds a note of desperate anticipation, begging us to recognise the inevitable return. Surely’s doubling is followed by the double cry of ‘the Second Coming’, the poem pausing to notice its irresistible vocalization (‘Hardly are those words out’) before stammering out its vision. Such a pattern of recurrence and difference seems to explain that things don’t just fall apart, they happen again, if in a different, more vocal and more violent way.
These bodily cries come from within. Vendler notices its fourteen lines could make up a sonnet, that traditional vehicle of emotion – but a defective or inverted one, its eight-line opening still crudely attached. If the first part’s rationally worded despair represented the head, the second part embodies the belly, the body of the poem. Which makes sense, as it introduces a terrifying deformed creature, ‘A shape with lion body and the head of a man’, weirdly matched with the poem’s semi-detached parts.
Spenser, a colonial administrator in Ireland, had few rivals (until Yeats) in his descriptions of violence. Notably, what had made The Fairie Queene’s Pyrrochles so angry was the brutal decapitation of his horse, leaving but a ‘truncked beast fast bleeding’. This is an image that seems almost to have leaked into Yeats’s poem, whose hybrid rough beast is always glimpsed in truncated body parts, with ‘blank gaze’ and ‘slow thighs’. Edmund Burke long ago explained how an object is the more terrifying when its limits remain unperceived – here, the animal’s ‘vast’ dimensions, form, and species all remain terrifyingly vague. Its name and origins are shrouded too: the word sphynx is never mentioned, so whether it emerges from the desert sands of Egyptian, or Greek, or Hebrew Old Testament myth to ask us riddling questions or loudly proclaim an apocalypse (Yeats associated it with ‘laughing ecstatic destruction’) is left to our imagination.
Yves Tanguy, Through Birds, Through Fire But Not Through Glass (1943) ?
The companion birthday poem ‘Demon and Beast’ only helps so much, containing as it does noisy creatures of a more quotidian order (‘that crafty demon and that loud beast / That plague me day and night’), but the poem does close by expressing the excitement, the ‘sweetness’ of religious revelation. This is something ‘The Second Coming’ shares. Only here the beast is the revelation: a dream called up to bodily reality through religious fervour, about which we reel irrationally, irresistibly, like the desert birds. As Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of ‘historical necessity’, but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless and unreal.
Unreal but bloody, vivid yet unborn, perhaps the beast’s greatest terror is this: that it represents not simply an exterior malevolent force but a longed-for interior revelation born out of quiet desperation. This is a creature spawned by our collective imagination, the spiritus mundi of the poem, a nightmare distorted embodiment of our daytime thoughts, the word made flesh, and given, by us, a horrifyingly rapturous welcome.
This then is our rough beast: we created it. It is also hour rough beast. ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last […]?’ is given the form of a sphynx’s unanswerable question: how, after all, can we know the future? Yet some answers are evident (‘now I know’ says the speaker). Precisely what this rough beast will be is unclear, but we too must know whose it is and (roughly) when it is: the long-gestated outcome of two millennia worth of hours, that terrible inexorable slow motion of twenty centuries now arriving on slow thighs, ‘at hand’, imminent, on time, ‘at last’ – presented in the poem’s paradoxically ever-present present in continual unhurried arriving, ‘slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born’, not for Christmas but a new advent. This is the way civilizations collapse: slowly – and then all at once.
The timing of all this was on Yeats’s mind. A long note featuring drawings of interlocking gyres (borrowed for the logo of Modernist Studies Ireland) from the poem’s first book publication at his sisters’ Cuala Press, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), concludes:
All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place. This is too simple a statement, for much detail is possible.
By this account, rational accumulation of knowledge is superseded by successive lightning flashes ‘constantly repeated’: a continuing sequence of sudden millennial revelations. At just this time Yeats was pestering the spirits about a comparable kind of quasi-simultaneous revelation – exactly when and how a poem’s images could transfer to other minds – when a poem was written, when first read (what if it was never read?), or every time it was read by every reader (what if they didn’t understand it?). He never got a direct answer. Still, as even that most cerebral of poets TS Eliot allowed, ‘poetry communicates before it is understood’. Each time a poem is read carefully (especially, Yeats concluded, when read out loud) it is made present and might produce revelation.
To do this a poem must work in sound. As an advent poem actually, ‘The Second Coming’ remains forever anticipatory, in the time just before, the beast paradoxically ever-imminent, its dim revelations ‘constantly repeated’. For Yeats this said something about the nature of historical time, but also about the nature of poetry. Every time the poem is read, its second coming can complete a historical cycle, hour thus completing a pattern, and completing several coinciding cadences: hour picks up drowned, round, slouches, and forms part of the ever-darker turn reel, nightmare, hour, towards, born, which last word turns again to the opening Turning.
When fully articulated, each of our highlighted words gyre, mere, surely, hour, turns to the rough beast’s snarling revelatory r sound. Maybe this makes for too crude a conclusion, but if the rational visible world is disintegrating, articulating sounds on half-conscious levels must, surely, be half-grasped to make sense of the new future. Even if we pay no conscious attention to sound, in other words, by working in sound even a futuristic predictive poem like this doesn’t go out of date. Not by rational assembly, but by organic force each time it is read its continual present plumbs a terrifying pattern deep beneath the disorder. That is one reason literature is news that stays news.
Adrian Paterson
Dr Adrian Paterson is Lecturer in English at the University of Galway, writing on modern literature and culture. Currently President of Modernist Studies Ireland, he is on the board of directors at Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society in Galway, curator of the multimedia exhibition Yeats & the West, co-editor with Charles I. Armstrong and Tom Walker of the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to W.B. Yeats and the Arts (2024) and with Christine Reynier of two E-rea special issues on modernist non-fictional prose (2018, 2020).
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.
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.”
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.
