In the Seven Woods

In the In the Seven Woods I see Yeats exploring issues surrounding love, age, art, and Ireland. Yeats approaches these topics in the context of mythology, dream, and illusion. This sort of mystic style plays a big role in the opening poem “In the Seven Woods.” And at the end we see the speaker, maybe Yeats, contented by the idea of a great archer awaiting to fire his bow.
Yeats then brings this archer into “The Arrow.” This is where Yeats also starts to address a woman. This is the beginning of a theme is see in these poems concerning beauty and love. The woman addressed in “The Arrow” appears to posses a unique beauty, demonstrated in the line “this beauty’s kinder.” There’s something particular to this beauty, something more appealing to the speaker. Then in the next poem, “The Folly of Being Comforted,” there is an exploration of a person’s opinion of his lover. I find that a reading could go in two directions. One is that the speaker is right and time could renew his love. On the other is that the speaker is delusional, that his lover’s beauty will diminish and vanish with age. From looking at other poems in the book I feel like my second reading holds up better. Even though Yeats was still fairly young when writing these poems, he seems preoccupied with aging and death. We see Yeats discourage love by describing a man who “gave all his heart and lost” (14). Similar attitudes are found in “O do not Love Too Long,” saying that one may grow tired of a lover they thought to be unified with. Although one can also see a love and beauty that Yeats is attracted to.
The love that I see Yeats supporting is one for art. While in many poems Yeats has a preoccupation with death, he approves taking hours to read a line of poetry (in “Adam’s Curse”). And this is expressed in how all of the poems in this booked are filled with characters from Celtic Mythology, i.e. Danaan, Lancelot, and Aengus.
I feel that a lot of these themes stem from Yeats’s timidity as a young man. The chapter from Yeats’s biography explained how Yeats substituted his physical ailments with intellectual arrogance. By immersing himself in mythology and literature Yeats was probably able to escape some of the frustrating elements of his life. But since they were an escape for him, it seems logical that they would end up distorted and darkened like in many of the poems.

Yeats as an Irish Poet

Yeats explores one of the most unique issues concerning the Irish identity, the lack of one. In the readings we read how Ireland has always been a locus of invasion, colonization, and rebellion. Inevitably this blurred the sense of what a true Irishman is. From looking at the history we saw how an Irishman could be Celtic, Viking, British, Catholic, Protestant, or some combination of all of these. And further each heritage has had a period of triumph, oppression, or rebellion. In a way Yeats has combined aspects of this history with the political unrest he had experienced in his lifetime to help define himself as an Irish poet.
In the Yeats poems I see a recurring character type, a wanderer. A wanderer suggests that a person does not have a home, or is not welcomed. Since Yeats had ties to the Fenian movement, he may have felt alienated by British rule, despite being a native Irishman. Usually through the wanderings of Yeats’ characters they encounter many specifically Irish problems. For example in “The Madness of King Goll” the speaker travels through different terrains like wetlands and forests. This relationship with nature that the speaker has mirrors Celtic poetry. Many of the Celtic poems I read through often were blessings, hoping that nature would be a guide and protector. And we see something like this in “King Goll.” In stanza four the speaker moves in unison with the hares and deer. But Yeats does not praise nature as much as original Celtic poetry, for in “King Goll” the speaker seems burdened saying he “must wander…summer’s heat and winter’s cold” (70). Other wanderers are in “Moll Magee” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Moll represents Ireland by being impoverished, and Yeats may be suggesting that this pity she yearns for may be what Ireland deserves. Then in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” we see a man wanting to settle down and have peace. This reminded me of the Land War in the history reading. The desire for property was something Yeats probably saw in his early life. And in the poem I feel that Yeats connects this one political conflict to the history of Ireland, since the Fenians wanted the Irish to rule Ireland. I look forward to seeing how these themes of alienation change through Yeats’ poetry, since he eventually became separated from the political movement that help start his career.

Questions:

Would you consider the poems we’ve read so far to be Modern? Since they seem very structured and embedded in traditions of Celtic poetry and folklore it seems hard to relate it to many of the definitions of Modernism we gave on Wednesday.

Who is Fergus? I found this poem very compelling, but difficult to make sense of.