W.B. Yeats: As a Love Port

Yeats love poetry needs little introduction to any lover of poetry. W.B. Yeats is widely recognized as greatest poet of the twentieth century and as a love poet, his output is equally unmatched for lyrical beauty and elegant language. An influence which undeniably stimulated both his poetic and Irish Obsession, was his fame doomed love for the fiery revolutionary Maud Gonne. He describes many famous beauties in his poem, but mostly all his poetry revolves around Maud Gonne. The poets of the romantic revival had paved the road for ‘Escapism’ for the doctrine of art for the sake of art. His frustration in love and his bitter experience in politics can be seen in his poetry. He wants to escape from this blooded and mire and also the inevitable degradation of the body and seeks a safe anchorage in the Tower, in Byzantium. But his lust for life is also no less intense than his longing to escape and he becomes content to live over again even.

W.B. Yeats lays stress that true love does not see physical beauty. A person who loves some one trulyalso love his or her beloved in the old age also. Heloves everything that his beloved keeps in her life.Yeats, Shakespeare also gives stress that true lovedoes not alters when it alteration find. His poem “Whenyou are old” Yeats is concerned with time and beautyhe says: “But one man loved the piligrim soul in you.”1.This little poem is full of intense feeling of love of thepoet for his beloved. The poet has been rejected byher at least twice by now, but he warns her that oneday when she will become old and shed all herphysical beauty, she will have to repent for his love for her, which is not physical like that of many others, butspiritual. The poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” iscomplex and unsettled relationship between the natural world and the supernatural world. This is a sweetpoem, and is almost autobiographical. The romanticstrain of the poet is obvious there: his world weariness and longing for an escape. He says in this poem that “Iwill arise and go now, and go to inns free”2. Yeats had developed a nation of perfect lovetelling about his idea of love, Yeats says, “I hadgathered from Shelly and the romantic poets an idea of perfect love. Perhaps I should never marry in Church

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but I would love one woman all life.”3 But he cannot realize that our world considers this idea of perfect love as outmoded and out dated loyalty and constancy are outworn concepts in our set-up. When he sees his idea of perfect love failing and fading, he comes to quarrel with the world. He creates a world out of space and time for his perfect love. For this reason he wants to escape in some other world from this world. He wants to forget all the tensions and worries of real life. Actually Yeats poetry is personal to some extent and in this regard , he is quite different from both pound and Eliot who believed in objectivity of poetry W.W. Robson writes : Yeats’ poetry is the record of a personal drama which must be understood as a whole.”4 “Sailing to Byzantium” in its final is a rejection of this world where the sensual youth holds the sway. Bodily love has been rejected for the soul’s love. The first line, “That is no country for old men”, out rightly rejects the sensual world. That indicates that the process of separation between the old speaker and the physical world is already complete. Through the physical love, the lovers come to attain spiritual love. Love either of body or of soul is insufficient in itself. It must embody both soul and body, to attain the state of wholeness. But throughout its wholeness, he recognized that “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement, that ‘Death and life were not/till man made up the whole; that out of all the anger and squabbling of Irish politics ‘A terrible beauty is born.”5

There are many literary books that tell about romanticism in Yeats poetry I have taken Norman A. Jeffares’s “W.B. Yeats: Man and Poet” for more detail analization of Yeats love poetry. This book tells us about Yeats love for Moud Gonne. I have gone through two or more poets to know about Yeats romanticism like Sunil Kumar Sarkar’s “W.B. Yeats: Poetry and Plays”, John Unterecker’s “A reader guide to William Butler Yeats.” Some material has been drawn from net. If we compare Yeats with T.S., Eliot, D.H. Lawrance, Wilfred owen all of these poets, as having escaped the nineties, inevitably approached their world from a different angel from Yeats. But it was still in many respects the same world. There is enough in Yeats early and his later poetry which is unmistaken ably romantic.

W.B. Yeats no doubt a romantic poet. Early his poems were dreamy, mysterious, fairy and legendary. His style was Spenserian, Shellyan, Keatsian. In his poemthere is profusion of romantic imagery worked outunder the inspiration of the Pre-Raphaelities. In thefirst phase, the lover is full of gloom, despair anddejection. He is at war with physical world because it is world where times reign supreme. Marching time leaveits imprints on his love. His intense passions subsidewith the passage of time. All the things of the Physical world are “Uncomely and broken.”6 Because the flow inthe flux of time. He wants to transcend this world oftime and attain a state of timelessness in some fairyland or Island.

1 W.B. Yeats, “Autobiographies” (London:Macmillon,1956), _287. 2 Sunil Kumar Sarkar, “W.B. Yeats: Poetry andPlays” (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers Ltd.,2002), P.53 3 Norman A. Jeffares, “W.B. Yeats: Man andPoet” (London: Rout Ledge and Kegan PaulLtd., 1949)2nd ed. P. 58 4 Sarkar, P.140 5 John Unterecker, “A Readers Guide to WilliamButler Yeats” (America: Thames and HudsonLtd., 1964), P.132. 6 K. Alpach, “The variorum Edition of the poemsof W.B. Yeats” (New York: Macmillan, 1977)7thed. P. 113