[Eric Berman]

Today we focused some on this poem, contextualized also with the recent MyCourses reading on Yeats’s stance on Rhythm in poetry (in “The Symbolism of Poetry”).  In this essay, Yeats asserts that rhythm is utilized by the writer to keep the readers in a sort of trance – “to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake… by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance.”

In the rest of the poem, Yeats consciously maintains a patterned rhyme and rhythm, and even draws attention to the fact that he is rhyming with the line “My rhymes more than their rhyming tell.”

With this in mind, the second stanza in “To Ireland in the Coming Times” deliberately subverts the entrancing of the reader in lines

“That hurry from unmeasured mind

<dl><dt>To rant and rage in flood and wind;</dt><dt>Yet he who treads in measured ways</dt><dt>May surely barter gaze for gaze.”</dt><dt>Yeats here trips up the reader’s natural assumptions of the sounds of the line, where ‘wind’ appears as though it should rhyme with ‘mind’. This pulls the reader out of the trance that poetry has been weaving around him, and draws deliberate attention to these lines themselves. These lines also allude to Yeats’s theories around rationality (measured ways) and the elements (flood and wind), though also acknowledges the implicit duality between an emotional and rational existence (hurrying away from an unmeasured mind leading to ranting and raging, which are emotional responses themselves?). Time itself is linked to this emotional existence, where Time similarly “began to rant and rage” in the first stanza.

For further areas of analysis, I’m curious about what the red-rose-bordered hem of the dress is intended to symbolize – the red rose makes me believe that it is a symbol for Ireland, but I think there is a further complexity in it.  The lines “Because the red-rose-bordered hem<dl><dt>Of her, whose history began</dt><dt>Before God made the angelic clan</dt><dt>Trails all about the written page” imply that this red-rose-bordered hem exists before the (Irish) clan ever existed, and while this fits into Professor Doggett’s point that Yeats and other authors idealize an Irish essence as something eternally prior to their own time, this account – to be Irish before indeed any Irish existed – seems a step too far.

</dt></dl></dt><dt></dt></dl>

[Harrison Dole]

I can understand the point that to be Irish before Ireland exists is over-stepping the  bounds of Yeats’ meaning in the poem.  However, I wonder if instead of implying that one can be “Irish” before Ireland exists that Yeats considers this characteristic to be innate to human nature beyond the racial confines of Saxon, Celtic, Germanic, or what have you.  Rather, as Yeats explains in “The Celtic Element in Literature”, “the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again brought ‘the vivifying spirit’ ‘of excess’ into the arts of Europe.”  What I think Yeats is getting at is that the Celtic nature is one that manifests the essence of humanity most accurately, and that it is one of few, if not the only heritage, that still perpetuates this essence so determinately in its modern culture.  So I think you’re right to conclude that the image of the red-rose-bordered-hem is a description of the Irish essence itself.  I simply think that Yeats wants his readers to expand beyond the historical confines of “Irish” identity, and instead connect to a wider scope of identity in humanity itself.  In doing so Yeats fortifies the Irish identity as one to be valued as the most accurate depiction of humanity’s heritage.

[Author]

Posts