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Yeats' Poetry (Leda & the Swan (Intersection between the divine…
Yeats' Poetry
Leda & the Swan
Intersection between the divine and mortal, exploring the dynamics of power and desire, and the tensions between creation and destruction
Connotations of seduction by portraying the union as a rape - overt violence of the collision, highlighted by the contrast between the strict and precise control in metre and rhythm of the sonnet form and present participial forms of “beating” and “staggering”.
Cutting caesuras "a sudden blow" - echoes the irregular pulsations of the rape and develop the prevailing masculine dominance and concomitant ruination of order
Vulnerability - "terrified vague fingers" "loosening thighs" - inevitability of an event out of the control of man kind (GYRES)
Salvaging of Leda's virginity is metaphorical of the colonial violence endured by Ireland between the Protestant Ascendancy and the Catholics during British Colonisation
Break in the sestet "and Agamemnon dead" - illustrating the beginning of a new era, paralleling Ireland's new monumental period in history
The Second Coming
Cataclysmic transition from a state of order to one inundated by total destruction through the framework of Yeats' gyres.
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Civilisation is undergoing complete and inevitable chaotic disorder, epitomised by the metaphor "Falcon" who "cannot bear the falconer", demonstrating the lack of nature order and authority
Colour imagery of "blood dimmed tide" and repetition of "loosed" suggests the inexorable loosening of violence
The periphrastic allusion to the Sphinx like figure, "shape with lion body and the head of a man" which Yeats associated with "laughing, ecstatic destruction" reiterate the controlling force of evil, undercutting the initial hope evoked by the biblical allusion to the second coming.
The ending rhetorical question is ambiguous and evokes notion of uncertainty, implying that the gyres may no longer be able to predict historical event as "the centres cannot hold" made corrupt by the wars of man, particularly WWI, "the war to end all wars"
Irish Airman
Paradox of life and death - tensions between human desire and historical determination in accounting for an individual's action and mortality
Monosyllabic assertion "I know" - emphasis on "fate" and imagery of the "clouds above" --> greater divine forces which govern man's mortality
Motif of clouds juxtaposes with "lonely impulse of delight" - harshness of "tumult" highlights the conflicting factors of human desire and historical determination in eliciting man's suffering
Opposing notions such as the antithesis of "hate" and "love" relfects the indifference of the Irish Soldiers in WWI and Yeats' ambivalence to the violence of the war
Chiasmus in the final quatrain of "I balanced all...the years...waste of breath the years...in balance"
Meaningful death fuelled by passion and not the constraints of "law" or ageing, the persona is able to transcend the suffering and disorder of human experience and find balance and unity
Easter 1916
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"Grey Eighteenth Century House" creates a sense that Yeats is experiencing some inner turmoil; as if he cannot quite let go of his former vision of Ireland accept that it has changed
"Motley" - conjures up images of ragged and disingenuous circumstances; somehow diminishing its legitimacy.
Yeats departs from realism to symbolism as there is a change in movement, history, fanaticism and rebellion represented through the blockage of the stone in the stream. Rhyme and repetition of this stanza remind us of the fixed, the petrification of the stone contrasted with the movement of the rests of the features of the landscape --> indictment of fanaticism
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"A terrible beauty is born". The birth of these united people is "terrible" because the fight for independence will inevitably cause bloodshed and death. It is also beautiful because the people are finally uniting and standing up for their beloved country
Through the rebel's sacrifice they have been made into figures of lore that do not change or alter with time (permanency of life, as opposed to the impermanency of literature. Furthered by the oxymoron "terrible beauty"