William Butler Yeats fell hopelessly, passionately, and blindly in love with that remarkable (and somewhat frightening) woman, Maud Gonne (see her picture here). If there has ever been great poetry written out of frustrated sexual desire, “When You are Old,” “He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead,” “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” and “The Song of Wandering Aengus” (along with “The Folly of Being Comforted,” “Adam’s Curse,” “No Second Troy,” “The Travail of Passion,” “The Lover Pleads with his Friend for Old Friends,” “The Lover Speaks to the Hearers of his Songs in Coming Days,” “He Thinks of his Past Greatness when a Part of the Constellations of Heaven,” and dozens more you aren’t reading) are it. But here is a perhaps sobering truth: Yeats fell in love with Gonne before he knew her very well (though they became close friends eventually and remained so until his death). For example, although they worked together closely and shared a passionate belief in Irish independence, Gonne for quite a while neglected to tell Yeats she was married to a Frenchman and had children. Should our enjoyment of these poems be influenced by the real story behind them? More generally, should our enjoyment of poetry be informed by knowledge of the reality surrounding its composition, or are we better off confining ourselves to the text of a poem and ignoring its context?
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” is both a poem of love — specifically the longing that a moment of perfect bliss can inspire — and a poem that makes use of Celtic mythology. On the surface, a poem about a man who spends his entire life searching for a magical fish-girl should seem silly. What prevents this poem from turning out that way?
Unlike most great poets, Yeats went through several phases in his career in which he wrote in quite different styles. What is particularly remarkable is that he was great in all of them. “The Second Coming” is an example of what is called his Modernist poetry — we will discuss in class what that means. It one of the most quoted poems of the twentieth century. Literary works have taken the names Things Fall Apart and Slouching Toward Bethlehem from it. I have heard the poem quoted on the news, in movies, and on TV shows. What about this apocalyptic poem sticks so strongly in people’s minds and keeps it relevant no matter what particular horrors come slouching toward us on our newsfeeds?
