Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Favorite Lines of Yeats
I love this poem. The images that Yeats creates (at least for me) are amazing. Yeats weaves time, age, and death into ever stanza beautifully. The first stanza he starts with "That is no country for old men." The second stanza starts "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick," He goes from what is not part of the landscape (old men) to what an old man is, "a tattered coat upon a stick." For some reason this connection really stuck out for me. In the first stanza there is also the line "Whatever is begotten, born, and dies," in the last stanza, Yeats writes, "Of what is past, or passing, or to come." The parallel here is unmistakable. For me, the third stanza was the hardest to understand, but I did love the line "and gather me/ Into the artifice of eternity." Overall, I just love the flow of this poem and my favorite stanza would have to be the last, I really like the images that Yeats conjures.
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Yeats' poem seems to explore the nature of time, and especially how it relates to the body. He seems to hold the Platonic idea that the immortal "soul" or "un-aging intellect" is distinct and separate from the "dying animal" in which it is contained. Thus, as time carries on, the intellect grows and gleans more form the world, while the body, once "begotten" and "born" moves into a stage of "sensual music," filling the planet with teeming life. The summer of life, corresponding to puberty and youth, is a sensual game, where intellect is surrendered for more physical pursuits. As time passes, however, the body decays, and the once-passionate love may grow thin or die. Soon, all that remains is the intellect, now ironically brimming with a new sort of "life," with information and ideas and experiences. However, these ideas cannot prosper long, for animal must soon perish. However Yeats consoles himself with the wish for a new sort of life, free of the weights of bodily needs or desires, into the city of Byzantium, free of time where "what is past, or passing, or to come" is all the same.
The first stanza of this poem is my favorite of the other three. He starts the poem with a great line of "that is no country for old men." I looked up what Country it is he is talking about in this poem and it is Ireland, he is leaving Ireland to go to Byzantium in Italy. Yeats goes on to comment how the place he is leaving is not a place for the eldery as it is a place for youth. "The young in one another's arms, birds in the trees," support that conviction. In this stanza, Yeats is basically saying that Ireland is not a place for the old because the youth do not even recognize the elderly as the ending couplet of the stanza is "caught in that sensual music all neglect monuments of unageing intellect." Here I believe the "monuments of unageing intellect" is refering to the elderly and the "all" is refering tot he youth in Ireland. I liked the rhyme, "Those dying generations-at their song, ... Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long." The line under this says that whatever is born will die. I am confused as to the relationship between fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long, what is meant by the word commend?
What makes this stanza interesting is because it is spoken from a person who is leaving one place to enter another. He is leaving because he is ignored where he is from, so you would think he would talk badly of the youth that "neglects" him. However, he paints a beautiful picture of the youth which makes the reader have a level of sympathy for this old man instead of thinking of him as a bitter old man. If thats what he was trying to do here then he certainly did it.
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