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.