working within such inherited genres as love poetry, the elegy, the self-elegy, the sonnet, and the occasional poem on public themes. But he is also a restless innovator who disrupts generic conventions, breaking up the coherence of the sonnet, de-idealizing the dead mourned in elegies, and bringing into public poems an intense personal ambivalence. In matters of form, too, he rhymes but often in off-rhyme, uses standard meters but bunches or scatters their stresses, employs an elegant syntax that nevertheless has the passionate urgency of colloquial speech; his diction, tone, enjambments, and stanzas intermix ceremony with contortion, controlled artifice with wayward unpredictability. A difficulty in reading Yeats? but also one of the great rewards?is comprehending his manysidedness.
Like Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Windham Lewis, Yeats was attracted to right-wing politics, and in the 1930s he was briefly drawn to fascism. His late interest in authoritarian politics arose in part from his desire for a feudal, aristocratic society that, unlike middle-class culture, in his view, might allow the imagination to flourish, and in part from his anticolonialism, since he thought a fascist Spain, for example, would 'weaken the British Empire.' But eventually he was appalled by all political ideologies, and the grim prophecy of 'The Second Coming' seemed to him increasingly apt.
Written in a rugged, colloquial, and concrete language, Yeats's last poems have a controlled yet startling wildness. His return to life, to 'the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart,' is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career. In one of his last letters he wrote: 'When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' . . . The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence.' He died in southern France just before the beginning of World War II. His grave is, as his poem directed, near Sligo, 'under Ben Bulben.' He left behind a body of verse that, in variety and power, has been an enduring influence for English-language poets around the globe, from W. H. Auden and Seamus Heaney to Derek Walcott and A. K. Ramanujan.
The Stolen Child1
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood2 in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
5
The drowsy water-rats; There we've hid our faery vats,
1. I.e., a child stolen by fairies to be their com-are in County Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where panion, as in Irish folklore. Yeats spent much of his childhood. 2. This and other places mentioned in the poem
.
THE STOLEN CHILD / 2023
Full of berries And of reddest stolen cherries.
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
Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim grey sands with light,
15 Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances, Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And is anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
25 To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than
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;
35 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
Away with us he's going, The solemn-eyed: He'll hear no more the lowing
45 Of the calves on the warm hillside Or the kettle on the hob Sing peace into his breast, Or see the brown mice bob Round and round the oatmeal-chest.
For he comes, the human child, To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than
you can understand.
you can understand.
you can understand.
he can understand.
1886,1889
.
2024 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Down by the Salley Gardens1
