![]() ![]() How many loved your moments of glad grace,Īnd loved your beauty with love false or true,īut one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,Īnd loved the sorrows of your changing face Īnd bending down beside the glowing bars,Īnd hid his face amid a crowd of stars. Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep When you are old and grey and full of sleep,Īnd nodding by the fire, take down this book,Īnd slowly read, and dream of the soft look What might have been a puerileĬliché turned, in the hands of Yeats, into a poetic masterpiece. When she is old and looking back on her life. Only, he, Yeats claims, loves her for her soul, a fact that she might recognize Despite the numerous admirers of her beauty, That their love will remain unrequited but that someday she might regret that The tone of frustration that would mark all of his poems to her, predicting One of hisĮarliest classic “Maud Gonne” poems, “When You Are Old,” already establishes Of his love for her inspired him to write such great poetry. Refused Yeats’ multiple proposals of marriage was because the unrequited nature Indeed, Gonne is said to have claimed that one of the reasons she Yeats’ attempts to win over Gonne (and his frustration at theįailure of those attempts) produced some of the most enduring love poetry of Her nationalism than was Yeats himself, which caused considerable tensionīetween them. Gonne, in fact, was much stronger and more militant in “When Youĭuring this same early period in his career as a poet, Yeats metĪnd fell in love with the English heiress and actress Maud Gonne, who hadīecome a strong sympathizer with the Irish Nationalist cause (her family had Is indisputably meant to be Irish also subtly points toward the possibility ofĪnd all dishevelled wandering stars. Otherworldly kingdom, free of the mundane cares of this one. Thrived around the time of Alexander the Great) to evoke a magical, The romantic image of the mythical Irish poet-king Fergus (who supposedly In James Joyce’s Ulysses, we learn that Stephen Dedalus sang this song to his dying The emphasis on Irish mythology that informs so much of Yeats’sĮarly poetry can be found in the poem “Who Goes with Fergus?” This poemĪctually first appeared as a song within Yeats’s 1892 play The Countess Cathleen. I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by I will arise and go now, for always night and There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive forĪnd I shall have some peace there, for peaceĭropping from the veils of the morning to I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,Īnd a small cabin build there, of clay and Irish lakeside cabin, free of the hustle and bustle of the modern world: Lake Isle of Innisfree,” in which the poet imagines moving, Thoreau-like to a peaceful Probably the best known of Yeats’s early romantic poems is “The Of this after he had sacrificed much of the first decade of the twentiethĬentury in helping to found the Irish National Theatre, taking much of his timeĪnd energy away from the writing of poetry. Modern, urban phase that demonstrated his tremendous range as a poet. ![]() Rural Ireland as a whole, Yeats had by this time already moved into a more Beginning with hisĮarly phase that drew upon Irish mythology to romanticize the Irish past and The cause of Irish independence or other related causes. Written), but much of his poetry was overtly political, written in support of The world’s greatest poets (though much of his greatest poetry had yet to be Not only had Yeats by this time established himself as one of ![]() When William Butler Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature inġ923, he became the first Irish writer to be so honored. ![]()
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