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?