Language In Yeats Poetry

Yeats’ poems are artistic, beautiful and highly crafted with striking imagery. His work is a brilliant combination of personal and political themes. This combined with his astonishing ability to create vivid, visceral images is the core of Yeats’ brilliance as a writer. Another key element of Yeats’ poetry is the use of forceful, authoritative language achieved by the use of direct statements, which carry the ring of certainty to his works. Yeats’ work offers a unique perspective on familiar events. In ‘Easter 1916’ (E16), ‘The Second Coming’ (SC), he presents a fascinating insight to the realities and uncertainties of that revolutionary period in Irish History. The prime reason his work from this period is interesting is that it provides us

This often autobiographical quality of his work makes the poems interesting as it gives the reader an insight into the reality of the poet’s life. An apt example of this is ‘WSC’, a poem in which Yeats’ explores themes such as love loneliness and the passage of time. All of which are intensely personal. Yeats’ employs the complex image of the “nine and fifty” swans to communicate his feelings of loneliness. He follows this with the monosyllabic and powerful line “and now my heart is sore”. Yeats ' use of monosyllabic language makes this account of his loss of youth and failed romances completely unambiguous. However, I think the most interesting lines occur in the second half of the poem in which he describes the swans as they “paddle in the cold companionable streams, or climb the air”. Once I unravelled the symbolism and understood what they had to say about relationships and the difference between shared life and a lonely existence I was able to identify with the poet. The streams may be cold but the swans have one another. They are united time does not seem to touch them “Their hearts have not grown

Speaking as Gregory, he says, "A lonely impulse of delight drove to this tumult in the clouds." The image of a young person knowingly heading into danger and almost certain destruction is poignant, beautiful, thought provoking. This poem deals with the theme of personal fulfilment, Gregory is bored with having a safe life. Something we can all relate to as it is easy to become entrapped in the mundane tasks of everyday life and sometimes the only way to feel a thrill is to brush with death. Thus showing how Yeats engages with personal issues with the use of visceral