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After completing the unit on W.B.Yeats’ poem our prof.Dr Dilip Barad Sir gave us a task as our thinking activity in classroom. So in this Blog I would like to talk about W.b.yeats poems. So first we see his poem 'The second coming'.
Analysis of "The Second Coming” as a Pandemic Poem:-
Original Poem:-
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensityI.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Written during the height of the Spanish Flu in 1919 and while his wife was herself stricken by the disease, W. B. Yeats penned this reflection, “The Second Coming”
The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920, and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer.The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
As pandemic poem:-
This is a poem that has borrowed its title from W. B Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’, explaining the serious consequences of COVID-19 pandemic on human life.
Yeats used the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts. The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic: In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees caught the virus and was very close to death.
William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" a hundred years ago, when the world seemed on the verge.The losses of the First World War were still overwhelming when millions more began to die in the waves of a flu pandemic, which infected Yeats's wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, while she was pregnant. She and their child would survive.
What we make of Yeats's poem a century later is like the history ahead, waiting to be made: it's up to us.
The poem is not about the Spanish flu, which left less of a mark on history than might have been imagined for an outbreak with such a heavy death toll, killing more Europeans than the cataclysmic four-year war with whose final stages it coincided. Nor does the pandemic seem to have had much of a direct imaginative impacts. While Yeats himself escaped the flu virus, his family had two potentially fatal brushes with the pandemic.
In this poem poet talk about the flu virus and this is might be related with our present because in now days we suffering from corona virus and for few days we find new Virus. So thing is that that time and this time is same. In flu Yeats lost his wife. And we also lost our lot's of people in this pandemic situation.
There is no particular virus in poem but because of virus he lost his wife.
So we might be considered this poem as pandemic poem.
And we all are waiting for second coming.
2)Evaluate 'On Being Asked for a War Poem.
‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), written in 1915 and published the following year. It’s one of Yeats’s shortest well-known poems, comprising just six lines, and sets out why Yeats chooses not to write a ‘war poem’ for publication.
On being arked for a war poem is one of the popular poem of w b yeats. W B Yeats was lived in the time of world war because he know very well about world war. In this poem he discribes his emotion and feeling. This is a poem that conveys a different aspect in which the war should be remembered.
Instead of the narrator conveying to us that we should remember the soldiers as heroes, this text states that we should leave the tormented veterans alone as they have been scared from their experiences.
The words ?who can please a young girl in the indolence of her youth, or an old man upon a winter?s night?. Is not only a rhetorical question but also a simile that is describing that you cannot please a young girl who is stereotypically a lazy child is not one to be easily pleased and an old man on a winter?s night is describing that he will not be good company as he would feel the winter?s night through his ancient bones. This is being compared to a war veteran as they are run-down and over-used. The men would now be tired of their exhausting memories being replayed over in their head for many years constantly.
Original Poem:-
I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
Summary:-
In summary, ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem about refusing to write a war poem when asked to produce one. This odd act of refusal-as-assent – writing a poem, but a poem which takes a stand against writing a certain kind of poem – has the air of irony about it, and Yeats probably intended his poem to be taken as a brief ‘thanks, but no thanks’.
Structure of the poem:-
In terms of its form, the poem is written in iambic pentameter, rhymed abcabc. The final two lines are the only ones which might cause some real head-scratching from readers (and critics), but Yeats appears to be making an appeal to the broad readership that poetry
(including his poetry, by 1915) enjoyed: young girls might enjoy his romantic verses about old Ireland, while an old man might enjoy.
Why did Yeats refuse to write a ‘war poem’?:-
In February 1915, Yeats had written to his friend Lady Gregory: ‘I suppose, like most wars it is at root a bagman’s war, a sacrifice of the best for the worst. I feel strangely enough most for the young Germans who are now being killed.’ Yeats goes on to say that the ‘bespectacled’ Germans he has seen remind him more of himself than the English soldiers (‘footballers’) or the French troops.
‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ could be productively analysed alongside ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, for this reason. Yeats objected to the war, and could not imagine using poetry to wave the flag for the right ‘side’ (and his Irish blood would have boiled at the idea of writing a patriotic poem in support of the British troops in the war!). His line ‘We have no gift to set a statesman right’ is a forerunner to Auden’s famous line that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, and the similarity is no coincidence: Auden makes that well-known statement in his elegy for W. B. Yeats, written in 1939.
Yeats’ poetry provides a view of the war which is Irish and Republican, and outside of the mainstream of British responses to the war. This poem is interesting in terms of the whole anthology because it declares that poets cannot write about war in activist or political terms. This can be strongly contrasted with a poem like Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ or Sassoon’s ‘The General’.
Yeats maintains an ironic tone. He belittles the role of an Irish Poet to seduce young woman and comfort and old man on his death bed. He characterized poets as meddlers. Although he states a "poets mouth" should "be silent" he voices his opinion by writing the poem in the first place. He is against WW1.
Conclusion:-
In sum up I can say that a changing nature is evident in Yeats' poetry, and I feel that this has made him become the highly admired and regarded poet that he is today. This unique aspect of Yeats' poetry makes his literature interesting and enticing, and thus, Yeats is one of my favourite Irish writer.
Thank you...
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