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Yeats Bundle Pack of Poetry Notes
Among School Children
FORM AND
STRUCTURE

-

Ottava Rima = type of structure/verse used for reflective poetry
Rhythm of Yeats’ Irish accent is apparent in his writing
A rhythm and sensuality to the last verse
Use of ‘child’ in each verse
Verses are numbered, idea of structuring and organising of experiences, similar to
children counting + classical references in verses to teachers: Plato, Aristotle, a
development of knowledge

CONTEXT

-

1926 Yeats as a school inspector visited a school in Waterford, taught by nuns
Yeats was conflicted as to whether Catholicism should be imposed on the children
or not
The children are learning biased history, influenced by Catholicism
Second verse is reference to Maud Gonne, she was his inspiration

THEMES

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

Knowledge & Religion

Love – Maud & Beauty

‘There is a comfortable
kind of old scarecrow’
- Scarecrows are
there to
manipulate,
affecting the
crops of learning,
the seeds in the
field are the
knowledge that
is being
manipulated by
the nuns

‘Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
Into the yolk and white of the
one shell’
- Plato’s symposium,
myth of the egg which
the serpent separated,
creating Earth and Sky
‘So saying, he cut those
human beings in two,
the way people cut sorb
apples before they dry
them or the way they
cut eggs with hairs
...
’
- Resurrection is
reflected by ‘ing’
participle endings
- Not finite,
continuous
afterlife
‘In rambling talk with an
image of air: Vague
memories, nothing but
memories
...
’
- Death has large impact on
living
- Classical allusion, Lady of
shallot impassioned by
Lancelot’s beauty, freezes to
death because she is cursed
– chilling her blood, idea
that you’ll die for love, that
burdensome beauty
‘In the first loveliness of
womanhood,’
- Different to beauty, there’s a
vitality to loveliness and
austerity to beauty, you can
be detached by it
‘In that mysterious, always
brimming lake’
- Lake symbolises heaven
- Idea of heaven being a
beautiful place,
filled/brimming with beauty
‘The last stroke of midnight dies’
- Midnight associated with
magic, the magic of time
- Personification of midnight,
the death of the past/time,
about changing

‘Your Beauty’
- Possessive
pronoun to
Maud, represents
the beauty of the
female
‘The certainty that I shall
see that lady… Has sent
me muttering like a fool’
- He makes her his
God, like a fool
he is consumed
by this, religious
imagery w/
ideology
- Idea if he’s
muttering then
he is inaudible to
others, lack of
communication
w/ Maud
because he can’t
get her to
understand his
feelings
- Fools are
associated w/
comedies which
end in resolution,
which end in
marriage, which
Yeats couldn’t
achieve w/
Maud, almost
autobiographical,
ironic
Stanza 4: ‘body’ ‘hands’
‘wrists’
- A listing of the
parts of her, he’s
objectifying her,
shows his
preoccupation
with the physical
body
- He could never
reach Maud
emotionally, only
through physical
ideas
‘The hands that I have
kissed’
- Kissing

someone’s hand
was erotic idea in
Victorian times
‘In rambling talk with an
image of air’
- He cannot
control love, time
or his thoughts

‘The certainty that I shall see that
lady… and with the fervour of my
youthful eyes’
Link to Among School Children:
‘she stands before me as a living
child’ – he sees her again in her
youthful image, hoping in both that
he’ll go to heaven with Maud?

OTHER POEMS

‘Burdensome beauty’ Helen of Troy
cause great wars with her beauty, in
the Illiad Helen’s beauty is referred
to as a burden
Link to Leda and the Swan: ‘A
sudden blow: the great wings
beating still against the staggering
girl,’ – beauty is a burden for Leda
because it leads to this incident, also
the classical allusion in the verse

Leda and the Swan
FORM AND
STRUCTURE

-

First stanza 8 lines = Octave
Second stanza 7 lines = Sestet
It’s like a sonnet, which are conventionally love poems, so Yeats is playing
against convention
Power of the visual narrative of the poem

CONTEXT

THEMES

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

-

Written 1923
Swan = associated with mythology, in Ireland represents freedom of the spirit
Myth: Zeus disguised himself as a Swan to get close to Leda and then raped her
Yeats compared the impregnation of Leda to the impregnation of Mary, Mary
impregnated by God and Leda by Zeus, creativity can be paradoxical as it also
causes destruction (the broken wall) and the destruction that came in the wake
of Christianity

Power

The Erotic

Mythology

‘A sudden blow: the great
wings beating still Above the
staggering girl, her thighs
caressed By the dark webs, her
nape caught in his bill,’
- Adjective ‘great’ shows
the unnatural power of
the bird, the idea of this
beautiful but violent
creature
- Noun ‘girl’ suggests she
is vulnerable to his
predatory behaviour
- ‘Beating’ = Yeats
referring to the power
of males to cause pain
+ subordinate women
- ‘Nape’ = often carry
children by the nape of
their neck, reiterating
her
vulnerability/inability
to stop the swan

‘Above the staggering girl,
her thighs caressed’
- Verb ‘Caressed’
creates a seductive,
almost intimate
image
- The duality of the
role of the powerful
male

‘A sudden blow: the
great wings beating still’
- ‘Beating’ =
present
participle ending
shows relevance
to the present,
it’s not just in
the past,
continuous

‘How can those terrified vague
fingers push The feathered
glory from her loosening
thighs?’
- ‘Glory’ represents male
domination
- Leda’s fears contrast
against the male’s
selfishness, an act of
violation
‘The broken wall, the burning

‘By the dark webs, her nape
caught in his bill,’
- ‘Nape’ = tender,
vulnerable place,
Yeats shows that
she is trapped
whilst creating this
erotic image
‘The feathered glory from
her loosening thighs?’
- ‘Loosening things’ =
sibilance is a
development of that
eroticism
‘And how can body, laid in
that white rush’
- Yeats creates a
double entendre of
sorts because the
Zeus in form of the
Swan is lying on the
girl, but he also lied
about his
appearance

‘The broken wall, the
burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead
...
’
- The abstract power
- It’s transient,
impermanent
- A metaphor for her
broken wall after being
raped
‘So mastered by the brute
blood of the air, Did she put on
his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak
could let her drop?’
- The association with
these
words/connotations
create an ambivalence
within the reader as to
whether she is
resisting his power or
surrendering to
pleasure
- ‘Let her drop’ =
monosyllabic, this
casual cruelty, she’s
dismissed with no
emotional attachment

‘Being so caught up… let
her drop’
- The para rhyme
suggests that its
unfinished/dissatisf
action
- Rape it’s self is
unsatisfying, an act
of artifice
- Disturbing question
of whether she
gained from this,
despite the fact that
she was exploited,
there’s an
incompleteness to
our
knowledge/underst
anding

OTHER POEMS

‘The great wings beating still’
Link to Easter 1916: ‘A
terrible beauty is born,’ the
juxtaposition of beauty and
violence we see in both poems,
‘born’ with creation comes
destruction
‘The broken wall, the burning
roof and tower And
Agamemnon dead’
Link to The Second Coming:
‘The ceremony of innocence is
drowned’ the loss and
corruption of child-like
innocence in both
Link to Among School
Children: ‘Changed some
childish day to tragedy’ loss of
child like innocence by rape
‘So mastered by the brute
blood of the air’
Link to The Second Coming:
‘The blood dimmed tide is
loosed’ violence is ubiquitous,
with destruction comes blood
and pain, violence is part of
human nature

‘The feathered glory from
her loosening thighs?’
Link to An Irish Airman: ‘A
lonely impulse of delight’
he rapes Leda for a brief
moment of pleasure,
similar to how Robert
Gregory flies before death
for that short moment of
pleasure
Link to Sailing to
Byzantium: ‘Consume my
heart away; sick with
desire’ All consuming
desire/lust which can lead
to terrible things, on
Byzantium Yeats said ‘I am
trying to write about the
state of my soul,’ in both
poems there is an insight
into the inner desires one
may have, the darkness of
the soul

The Wild Swans at Coole
FORM AND
STRUCTURE

-

Iambic Pentameter
Written in regular stanza form
ABCBDD Rhyme Scheme
Enjambment and undulating lines convey the ripples in the water
Melancholic tone – sombre but serenic

CONTEXT

-

Coole Park was Lady Gregory’s stately home
Written in 1915 when Yeats turned 50, the poem is an elegy for lost youth
He visited Coole Park nineteen years before in 1896
Wild swans are a symbol of the timeless, eternal beauty of the aristocratic way of
life threatened by the post war world
Yeats was influenced by the symbolist moment and said this poem was to
‘prolong the moment of contemplation’

-

THEMES

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

Nature
‘Mirrors a still sky;’
- Metaphor for how the lake
reflects the sky
‘Under the October twilight’
- Twilight has romantic
connotations, setting a
picturesque scene
‘The nineteenth autumn has come
upon me Since I first made my
count;’
- ‘Nineteenth autumn’ suggests
a fixation with this season,
Autumn is when Coole Park
is at the height of its beauty
- People count to organise, but
these swans cant be
controlled, they scatter
- Its impossible to keep things
static as nature cant be
controlled
‘The first time on this shore’
- Suggests a larger expanse of
land, the small moment
seems very significant to
Yeats

Ageing/Time
‘Under the October twilight’
- Yeats is in the twilight of his life
‘The woodland paths are dry’
- Image of Yeats edging towards the end of
his fertility ‘dry’
‘Nine-and-fifty swans’
- Touch of archaism to many of his poems
- He has a strong sense of time, counts the
swans
‘I have looked upon those brilliant creatures’
- Present perfect tense, brings it into the
present
‘The bell –beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread’
- ‘Bell-beat’ = connotations of time, bell
chime and toll, sound conveys longing for
action of youthful energy
- ‘Trod with a lighter tread’ = recalls his
youth, Yeats used to identify with the
swans more when he was younger, the
idea that they are energetic weighs upon
him now, he is old but the swans are
eternally young
‘Unwearied still’
- Yeats compares the longevity of the
swans to his own life
‘Their hearts have not grown old;’
- Yeats envies the swans youth, thus an
elegy to lost youth
‘Delight men’s eyes when I awake ‘someday’
- Yeats accepts the inevitability that at
some point even these symbols of
youthful energy and the freedom that
comes with it belong to younger men
than Yeats

OTHER POEMS

‘Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where
they will’
Link to Leda and the Swan: ‘Before
the indifferent beak could let her
drop?’ Birds represent freedom, they
are free to do as they please, but
swans are also creatures of violence
Link to The Fisherman: ‘Write a
poem as cold and passionate as the
dawn’ dawn in contrast to twilight,
dawn symbolises the beginning and
twilight represents his life coming to
a close

The Second Coming
FORM AND
STRUCTURE

-

CONTEXT

‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;’ the caesura reflects meaning, idea of
things fragmenting and splitting
Demarcation between ideas in first and second stanza
Loose meter of poem, very close to free verse, written in iambic pentameter
-

THEMES

Written 1919
Title is from the book of revelation, prophecy: at end of world terrible
things will happen and Jesus will come
Yeats married wife who believed she was a spiritual medium, used to
write down what spirits would tell her, they would discuss these
prophetic ideas that came to her in her trance like states
Poem relies on vagueness of Christian memory, you can interpret
through a biblical or Christian approach
1930s people saw it as a prophecy about fascism + Hitler was the ‘rough
beast’ + out of this would come a new episode of history (WW2 started
around 1939)

Religion

History

The mystical &
nature

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

‘Turning and turning in the widening
gyre The falcon cannot hear the
falconer;
- Turning = use of verbs
meaning/representing
circularity, uses present
participle
- History is circling around birth
of Christ, getting further away
from Christ so Christianity gets
fragmented
- Jesus is falconer, people can no
longer see Jesus
- Idea of pessimism in the poem
- Bird symbolises freedom,
moving away from fixed set of
beliefs/controller
‘Surely the Second Coming is at hand
...
’
- Questioning what
eternity means, a
belief in God and the
Christian afterlife is
artifice/not real

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz
FORM AND
STRUCTURE

-

It’s an epitaph (short text honouring a deceased person)
Mirrors the structure of a Petrachen Sonnet, but the poem is longer
End of stanza one: almost a cyclical structure, starts with youth, then reaches
maturity, then reflects on youth

CONTEXT

-

THEMES

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

Written 1927 after both women had died (sisters)
Eva lived 1870-1926
Con lived 1868-1927
Constance was first woman to get elected in parliament: Yeats was fascinated
by women who broke conventions, a patriarchal attitude to women + women
who break the mould
Lissadell was a neo-classical Georgian house, he met the girls there in 1894, he
was attracted to the gracious living of the gentry
Yeats thought the family had neglected its aristocratic duty to work with the
peasants, he goes back to confine the women in the house in the poem, the
Victorian idea of the idealised family affects Yeats

Beauty/Age

Politics

Aristocracy/Wea
lth

‘Beautiful, one a gazelle’
- ‘Gazelle’ metaphor
for elegance of Eva
‘But a raving autumn
shears Blossom from the
summer’s wreath
...
’
- Yeats referring to Con’s
participation in the Easter
rising 1916
- Adds to the irrelevance of her
ways by calling them ‘younger
dreams’ suggesting she was
young and foolish
- He thinks she dreamed of
‘Utopia’ = unachievable state
- ‘Skeleton-gaunt’ suggests
politics tainted her, fervour
can corrupt beauty
‘Arise and bid me strike a match And
strike another till time catch;’
- Extended metaphor
- Striking a match is a
resistance almost to the
darkness around you, to the
corruption of politics etc
- Reference to the ideas which
strike you when your
imagination lights up
‘Should the conflagration climb’
- Fire can be destructive, a sign
of revolutionary action
‘All the folly of a fight’
- Another reference to politics
shows the madness of what
they are doing
- The childishness is

‘The light of
evening,
Lissadell’
- Starts
with a
house,
house
was a
symbol
of the old
aristocra
cy
‘Two girls in silk
kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a
gazelle’
- Yeats
relates
the
sisters to
Asian/Af
rican
themes
to show
how they
do not ‘fit
in’ to
their
aristocra
tic lives:
‘silk
kimonos’
and ‘one
a gazelle’
illustrate

taken from
Midsummer
Night’s Dream
‘Now you know it
all’ suggests that
they didn’t know
everything before
they died, but now
– in death – they
can have the
ultimate,
omnipotent,
knowledge

emphasized by rhyming ‘fight’
and ‘right’ together, by
showing the immaturity of the
poem’s structure
‘We the great gazebo built’
- The comparison of a ‘gazebo’
attached to a house shows the
way that Ireland is attached to
Great Britain
- Makes the arrangement seem
temporary, and weak
- Can also show them making a
fool of themselves, as ‘gazebo’
means to make a fool of
oneself in colloquial HibernoEnglish
...
Ezra, Wolfe Tone
(died 1798)
Yeats was ambivalent about nationalism
Religion

Irish Nationalism/Politics

‘And add the halfpence to the pence And
prayer to shivering prayer, until you
have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save’
- Antagonistic towards priests and
institutions
- Strikers want pay rise but idea
that prayer is all you need
- Marrow from bone = little value
left, people are almost
eviscerated by religion
- Bone = sense of mortality, images
of death
- Prayer, pence, bone = plosive
sounds show aggression against
people peddling their own
religion
‘God help us, could they save?’
- Reference to prayer, irony
- Futile rhetoric question
‘Was it for this the wild geese spread’
- Reference to the Irish Catholic
soldiers who went abroad
because weren’t allowed to be
catholic soldiers in Ireland
- Birds symbolise freedom

‘What you need, being come to sense, (next
line) But fumble in a greasy till,’
- Enjambment, continuous comment
- Adjective: greasy suggests
corruption + employers exploiting
workers, It’s Dickensian in the idea
of greed
‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s
with O’Leary in the grave’
- O’Leary was idealist so it’s died
with him/his vision died with him,
Metaphor, his spirit/dream dead
- Romantic = connotations of
dreamy, idealistic, not real

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