[Harrison Dole]

I find it interesting that Yeats can consider himself so anti-politics, and how he criticizes those who concern themselves with politics, because doesn’t his criticisms of political people and their practices involve him in the very conversation that he so loathes?  Perhaps I am thinking too deeply into it, especially considering how many of Yeats’ paradoxes we’ve attempted to de-code in class, but I cannot help but feel that Yeats is notorious for subtly denying and participating in issues on modern Ireland simultaneously. When Dr. Doggett today pointed out today that Yeats’ words can adopt one meaning, while his form can suggest the exact opposite, I become more aware of Yeats’ consciousness as a result of this new transition into more direct, conversational verse.    As we escape the dreamy mystical side of his work, I wonder just how mind-bendingly contradictory and yet simultaneously agreeable Yeats’ work will become.

[Elyssa Slawinski]

I have to agree with you, Harrison. I think the fact that Yeats’ words can suggest one meaning while his form may suggest the opposite is one possible reason as to why he may have gone through his transitional phase — it wasn’t always the best way to show what he actually wanted to show. He moves away and even abandons his ideal portrayal of peasant life after finding that he did not accomplish exactly what he wanted. He was convinced that the peasents were the key to revitalizing Ireland while they were not in the best place in society to do so. He realizes in this phase that a turn to the aristocracy is nessassry because the peasents of a true Ireland were in somewhat of a catch 22, and unable to affect change (well, they could have, but they didn’t). He also decides to become more explicit and outright, so that his messages are clearer in a sense — still not entirely, as Harrison points out, but I would argue more so than before. The language changes and so does his idea of what makes and who can appreciate true art. Yeats’ “A Coat”  is a good example of this shift. In the past, he used “embroideries/ out of old mythologies,” he then refers directly to his idea of aritocratic ideals and not looking like you are trying: “”For there’s more enterprise/ In walking naked.” So he is no longer embellishing his work in favor of trying to look like he’s not trying a la artistocracy (a new paradox). He feels that this art is more dignified and a clearer way to get his message out to aritsotcrats and make himself a part of that group.

[Jarad Sassone-McHugh]

I think “A Coat” and the paradoxes surrounding Yeats’ transition and general growth as a poet becomes even more complicated when juxtaposed with part VI of Upon a Dying Lady, “Her Courage.”  Yeats writes in “Her Courage” “When her soul flies to the predestined dancing-place / (I have no speech but symbol, the pagan speech I made / Amid the dreams of youth).” In “A Coat” Yeats casts off symbolic and mythological “embroidery,” yet in “Her Courage,” which was written later, he once again dons that embroidery. When considering why he does this, I wondered whether the context of a death and the recognition of his own mortality may have driven Yeats to reflect upon the vicissitude of his poetic style up through this point in his life. Something about death makes him “have no speech but symbol.” As the poem progresses, he maintains that symbolic and mythological language: “All but the terrors of the woodland flight forgot / That made her Diarmuid dear…” Accordingly, Yeats refers back to the woodland that he often wrote of in his younger days, and alluding to Diarmuid, a character from Irish mythology, revitalizes his Irish cultural nationalism. In this instance, Yeats reflects upon the poetry of his youth and contradicts the move performed in “A Coat” thus further complicating the paradoxes seen in his transition

[Devon Poniatowski]

Harry, something you said has me thinking a bit more about the stark and ironic differences between Yeats’s earlier, dreamy poems (from “The Rose,” for instance) and the futile ones we are now getting in to (from “The Tower”). You’ve mentioned that “we escape the dreamy mystical side of [Yeats’s] work” once we encounter his later poems, and that his poems become “mind-bendingly contradictory” in comparison with each other. I want to add on to your argument by commenting on Yeats’s use of the rose as a symbol in his earlier work—and how it seems to evolve into a representation of ephemerality.

In art history for example, flower paintings are often more than a mere depiction of loveliness: they’re a confrontation of life’s transience. A flower blooms and dies so quickly… Its existence in full flourish is short–lived. It’s interesting that in Yeats’s early work, he puts such blind faith in the beauty of the rose and the rose’s potential, almost as if his later poems (as they call to mind the reality of old age, death, and the illusory idea of beauty) rebut the poems he wrote when he was younger. I have to wonder if Yeats had a sense of this inevitability from the beginning? It is interesting to learn about Yeats’s gyre philosophy from “A Vision,” and think of it in relation to his belief in the cyclical nature of history. I think that the change in symbolism of the rose (from ideal beauty via cultivation, to ultimate and inescapable ephemerality) fits very well into Yeats’s dedication to “phases” and the idea that experiences progress in cycles. The idea also works to negate the assumption that the rose is desirable and worthy of being sought; it will ultimately wither no matter what sort of cultivation it undergoes to attain fleeting beautification.

[Joseph Figliolia]

Devon I think your point about the changing function of the Rose in yeats’ poetry is a good one. I agree with you that even in Yeats’ early poetry, the rose serves as a symbol of transience. By definition, a flower is closely linked to the earth and the cycle of seasons, and by extension, inevitable death and decay. Paradoxically, however, yeats also conceptualizes the rose as a symbol of immortality independent of time and space. In the “Rose upon the Rood of time,” the Rose exists outside a subject-object framework allowing it to be both independent of the world, and simultaneously immanent. This is similar to the image of Attis hanging between two parts of the tree that are both “staring fury” and “blind lush leaf” in the poem vacillation. Although the “staring fury” and “blind lush lead” serve different symbolic functions, they are ultimately part of the same tree that comprise the “whole scene” characterizing human existence.

[Author]

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