Teacher’s Note

This guide has been tested successfully with students and gives them ways for them to develop a much deeper response to literature, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on poetry. It also shows how to analyse at the levels of form, structure and language – the first two of which seem to cause near universal difficulties.

Context

This poem was written in 1938, just before Yeats’ death.

Structure

The poem is written as a conversation between the man and an echo. It is composed of rhyming couplets which is the simplest rhyme form.

Stanza 1

The word ‘Alt’ is a rocky fissure at Knocknarea, County Sligo. The phrase ‘broad noon has never lit’ suggests a dark, secluded place.  This is an alliterative phrase ‘shout a secret to the stone’ ; ‘shout’ suggests a public declaration but by shouting at ‘the stone’ the man keeps his secret while making...

Context

This poem was written in 1927. The people mentioned in the title are Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926) and Constance Markiewicz (nee Gore-Booth) (1868-1927). They were childhood friends of Yeats.

Structure

The poem has 3 stanzas with 10 or 12 lines. There is no regular rhyme scheme in the poem which may reflect the fact that Yeats is writing about friends; this is a personal poem and not the place for the formal or structured.

Stanza 1

‘Lissadell’ is a late Georgian house, home of the Gore-Booths, in County Sligo. The description...

Context

This poem was written after a visit by Yeats in his capacity as a Senator to St Otteran’s School, Waterford in 1926. The school was run on Montessori principles.

Structure

The poem is 8 stanzas long with 8 lines per stanza. It is also written in ottava rima, a verse form Yeats used in Sailing to Byzantium. The subject matter is appropriate for this verse form – the changing face of man and mortality.

Stanza 1

Yeats walks through the school in the company of Mother Philomena who ran the school. He lists the children’s activities...

Context

This poem can be seen in reference to The Second Coming; it describes a moment that represented a change of era in Yeats’ model of gyres. But where Yeats’ poem The Second Coming represents the end of modern history, Leda and the Swan represents something like its beginning; the rape of Leda by Zeus resulted in the birth/hatching of Clytemnestra, Helen, Castro and Polydeuces (Castor and Polydeuces were war gods) and this brought about the Trojan War which in turn brought about the end of the ancient mythological era and the birth of...

Context

This poem was written in 1926 and first published in 1928. Yeats wrote in a draft script for a 1931 BBC broadcast:

I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts about that subject I have put into a poem called Sailing to Byzantium. When Irishmen were illuminating the Book of Kells, and making the jewelled ‘croziers’ in the National Museum, Byzantium was the centre of European civilization and the source of its spiritual philosophy, so I symbolize the...

Context

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War. Richard Ellman and Harold Bloom suggest the text refers to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Bloom argues that Yeats takes the side of the counter-revolutionaries and the poem suggests that reaction to the revolution would come too late. Early drafts also included such lines as: “And there’s no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt,” and “The good are wavering, while the worst prevail.” (Wikipedia)

Yeats intended The Second Coming to describe the current historical moment –...

Context

This poem was written as a reaction to the Easter Rising of 23-29 April 1916.

It was written in September 1916 when Yeats was staying with Maud Gonne MacBride at Les Mouettes, Calvados. In it he records his reactions to the Easter Rising in Dublin, when the city centre was occupied by a force of around 700 members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, led by Patrick Pearse, and members of the Citizen Army, led by James Connolly. They held out for 6 days – 15 of their leaders were sentenced by courts martial and executed between 3rd...

Context

This poem was first published in 1916. The Fisherman is presented as the ‘ideal man’ with his country skills; he is also a symbol for Ireland – where Yeats believes the ideal man ‘exists’. It draws a contrast between Yeats’ ‘ideal Irishman’ and the real man of his contemporary Ireland. Yeats was a skilled fly fisherman and used this knowledge to develop the character of the fisherman.

Structure

The poem is written as a single stanza with a regular ABAB rhyme scheme, 3 stresses per line.

The word ‘him’ refers to...

Context

This poem was first published in 1919. It is widely believed to be a tribute to Major Robert Gregory, the only child of Lady Gregory; he joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1916 and was shot down in 1918 over Italy.

Structure

This is a 16 line poem written in iambic tetrameter (4 quatrains of alternating rhymes). The title reflects the reality of life for airmen in WWI. This may have happened to many people fighting during wars: they know their death is approaching but there is little they can do about it. There is no real sense of...

Context

This poem was first published in 1917 when Yeats was 52 in a collection of the same name. The setting is in Coole Park, Galway, the home of Lady Gregory. Lady Gregory was a patron and friend of Yeats and he first visited her home in 1897.

Structure

The poem has 5 stanzas each 6 lines long and is written roughly in iambic pentameter; 1st & 3rd lines = tetrameter, 2nd, 4th & 6th lines trimester, 5th line pentameter. Pattern of stresses 434353. This is very precise and links with the precision of the subject matter – events are...

Context

This poem was published in 1914 at the start of World War One. It is about remorse over failure in love and the fear that this remorse will continue after death as a purgatorial punishment. This could be said to have links with the ‘guilt’ which is felt particularly by Irish Catholics. Some commentators have said that the failed love was for Maud Gone, but it doesn’t really matter for the readers’ understanding of the poem.

Structure

This poem is 1 stanza long, a total of 12 lines. There is a regular rhyme scheme with all the...

Context

This poem was first published, unsurprisingly, in 1913 and was inspired by the dispute over the Lane art gallery in Dublin; Hugh Lane wished to present his collection of French paintings to Dublin but there was disagreement about whether the City should provide or pay for a gallery to house them.

Structure

4 stanzas, 8 lines in each. The last 2 lines of each stanza form the refrain. A regular rhyme scheme is used which shows the control that Yeats’ displays in much of his poetry.

Stanza 1

The use of ‘you’ means the Irish people...

Context

First published in 1886 when Yeats was 21. This poem is set in County Sligo where Yeats spent part of his childhood; some actual locations mentioned illustrate Yeats’ fond reminiscing about his childhood – Yeats has a tendency to romanticise childhood.

The poem also illustrates Yeats’ interest in Irish mythology – the story of a child abducted by ‘faeries’. This feeds into many cultures’ fears of loss of children; also the story of changeling children (a human child abducted and replaced with faery child).

There is a...

William Butler Yeats

Yeats was born into a strongly Protestant family in 1865 in the Irish and largely Roman Catholic city of Dublin; Yeats was the son of Susan Pollexfen and John Butler Yeats; his mother was a member of a wealthy milling and shipping family; his father was originally a barrister but later followed his other son into painting.

He was educated at Godolphin School, Hammersmith and High School, Dublin. He studied at School of Art, Dublin and developed an interest in mystic religion and the supernatural. Yeats identified himself...

Yeats’s poems are studied for:

OCR English Literature AS Unit F661

Section A: Poetry 1800–1945

The focus of this section is the study of selected poems of one poet. Your students will need to answer one question on one poem of the poet studied and...

1. Specifications & Assessment Objectives

2. An Introduction

3. The Stolen Child

4. September 1913

5. The Cold Heaven

6. The Wild Swans at Coole

7. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

8. The Fisherman

9. Easter 1916

10. The Second Coming

11. Sailing to Byzantium

12. Leda and the Swan

13. Among School Children

14. In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz

15. The Man and the Echo