In the Seven Woods

The William Butler Yeats of In the Seven Woods is a frustrated poet, an occasionally bitter, occasionally self pitying, poet, one who seems to wonder if his words may as well be written in water. W.B. is surely "in the woods", here, though willingly, as he declares in the eponymous poem: contemptuous of the fin de siecle epoch, of "...new commonness/Upon the throne and crying about the streets", Yeats exiles himself. Unfortunately, it seems that the world he exiles himself to is for others hopelessly anachronistic. In the "The Arrow" Yeats' notion of beauty is deemed "out of season". And in the "Folly of Being Comforted", an "ever kind" acquaintance praises the wisdom of Yeats' beloved, while the poet avers that it is actually her beauty that is the object of his passion. In "Old Memory" Yeats turns on his own ideas:

'Your strength, that is so loft and fierce and kind,/It might call up a new age, calling to mind/The queens that were imagined long ago,/Is but half yours: he kneaded in the dough/Through the long years of youth, and who would have thought/It all, and more than it all, would come to naught/And that dear words meant nothing?'

He reminds his thoughts, or rather a disassociated self that believes them, that they would not exist without him. In fact, though, the youth who thought words "meant nothing", will be proven wrong; words, Yeats says, will last longer, will outlive the poet. The legendary "queens" can be resurrected by future generations, but it will be a different set of people "kneaded in the dough", i.e. actually alive, bringing them back to life

Poems 77~80 poems can all be seen as examples of Ellman's description of Yeats' conservativism. Ellman writes that Yeats' struggles with his enlightened father J.B. Yeats informed Yeats' vision: "like the avant garde in Paris today who, wishing to escape the older generation and finding that the older generation was Dadaist, surrealist, and rebellious, is obliged to attack from the point of view of the conservative." The seasonal metaphor of "In the Seven Woods" suggests that aesthetics, or even world views (specifically here a Romantic, though in important ways Modern concept of the world) are also cyclical, and that Yeats' will have its (second) turn.

"[S]ince his father spoke of rationalism with sympathy, and since revolt was stirring in his own bones, he looked round him for authority to contest the paternal position," Ellman writes. He adds that one way in which Yeats challenged his father was believing Christian dogma. The closing poems of In the Seven Woods are religious poems, but they are also subversive poems. "The Players ask for a Blessing on the Psalteries and on Themselves" is an invocation by believing singers and players to angels, "masters of the shining town", that they worship, to remember and save them. The music the players make will be immortal, but the players (or poets) themselves are not. The "weight of mortal hours", the "heavy history", everything that makes up the world we live in, is immaterial, a seeming argument against rationality and empiricism. Yeats writes desperately, as if the "Kinsmen of the Three in One", i.e. the Holy Trinity, are on their way "[T]hey hurry down", even as "[O]ur hands ebb away".

In the last poem, "Happy Townland", the Poet visits a quasi~Utopia that nevertheless leaves the reader uneasy. Here the "queens" of "Old Memory" are ressurected~though impersonally, "dancing, in a crowd". In some ways, this "townland/That we are riding to" is like the world of "The Arrow", i.e., the world of concepts and ideas. There is a Gnostic aspect to the story of the townland; apparently, its cosmology so powerfully transcends the physical world that it would crush ordinary men to hear about it. This is not an ordinary Christian afterlife, then (as the fox says, it is " 'The world's bane', not the world's salvation). However, it does have Christian mythology at work: it is guarded by the angels Michael and Gabriel, albeit in a mythological, shape shifting form.

"Adam's Curse", a scene with dialogue, is by far the most realistic, least allegorical of the poems. How does it offset the others?

In "Under the Moon", what relationship does the obscurity of the words read in the present day have to the conjuring power of the poem?

Is there a complacent and/or bourgeois aspect to these poems? Is it attractive? How?

"The Madness of King Goll" & "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"

At the heart of both poems, Yeats is preoccupied with Ireland's ancien regime, with social change, and with modernity. Both poems feature narrators torn between the natural or felt, and immanent reality, and in both this is symptomatic of an identity paradox.  Yeats as poet seems to be suffering his own (invented?) identity crisis by writing in formal, rhymed meter but employing ambiguous, difficult symbolism. 

"The Madness of King Goll" (a monologue, in six sonnet like stanzas): The poem is a lyrical history of the poetic spirit of Ireland that has each stanza, or each chapter in Ireland's history, clamoring to be heard. The competing, incessant voices of the past, which are identified in italics at the end of each stanza as the "beech leaves old" ("leaves" here have the handy double meaning of a trees' green foliage and the pages of a book) haunt King Goll, the putative Irish monarch/embodiment of Irish spirit. To emphasize the disconnect Yeats has written the third and fifth stanzas in the past tense and the fourth in the present; the events are so confused or mixed up in Goll's mind that they are remembered out of order. Roughly each of the events can be correlated to an epoch in Irish history: the 1st, druidic; the 2nd early Catholic/St. Patrick; the 3rd medieval Ireland (from which the symbol of the Irish soul, "a whirling and a wandering fire", is forged); the 4th is the present, with the speaker seeking respite from the modern world in the natural yet feeling his own mortality; the 5th early modern, featuring the samizdat~esque "tympan"; the 6th  and final the symbolic disconnect between ancient and modern. The final stanza features the ambiguous symbol of "wires", which seem to be clipped, freeing the speaker but stealing something from him as well.  

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (dactylic hexameter? alternating on the last line of each stanza with pentameter, maybe in the style of classical poetics, and so pointing up the ancient vs. modern). The speaker longs for a monastic life in the country, where he will adopt older ways of living. In this slower world, time seems to become inverted: "midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow", suggesting an escape from aging. In the third and final stanza, the irony of the speaker's longing is suggested by his day to day surroundings, the modern infrastructure of "roadways" and "pavements grey". The disconnection between Yeat's speakers' longings is located in his "deep heart's core"; this may also be the only place where his desire will be fulfilled. 

Questions There is a discrepancy between the speaker of "King Goll", and the title, which labels him "mad". Who should we believe, or to what degree is the "madness" of Goll ironic? What is Yeats' attitude to Goll, and those who would describe him as mad? 

What does Yeats accomplish by making the connection between the "wires" and the "whirling and a wandering fire" ambiguous? Is "King Goll's" meaning diluted by the range of interpretations (Catholic, political, ontological)? 

 

How are realistic details at play in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"? Are the poem's description of the natural convincing? On how many levels?  

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was...