Page 373 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle
period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet. His
later poetry and plays are written in a more personal vein, and the works written in the last twenty
years of his life include mention of his son and daughter, as well as meditations on the experience of
growing old. In his poem, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”, he describes the inspiration for these
late works:
Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

During 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee near Gort in County Galway (where Yeats had his summer
home since 1919) for the last time. Much of the remainder of his life was lived outside of Ireland,
although he did lease Riversdale house in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham in 1932. He wrote
prolifically through his final years, and published poetry, plays, and prose. In 1938, he attended the
Abbey for the final time to see the premier of his play Purgatory. His Autobiographies of William
Butler Yeats was published that same year.
While Yeats’ early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore, his later work was engaged with
more contemporary issues, and his style underwent a dramatic transformation. His work can be
divided into three general periods. The early poems are lushly pre-Raphaelite in tone, self-consciously
ornate, and, at times, according to unsympathetic critics, stilted. Yeats began by writing epic poems
such as The Isle of Statues and The Wanderings of Oisin. His other early poems are lyrics on the
themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects.

Yeats’ middle period saw him abandon the pre-Raphaelite character of his early
work and attempt to turn himself into a Landor-style social ironist.

30.3.1 A Prayer for my Daughter: Text

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea

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