His poems are filled with references to hidden things: the fairies, the Druids, the “far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose.” Just before he died, Yeats was especially taken with the Indian philosophy of Vedanta, which teaches that the whole universe is an illusion. A great man in his pride Confronting murderous men Casts derision upon Supersession of breath He knows death to the bone - Man has created death. Yeats was never fully at home in the material world. A dying animal A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all Many times he died, Many times rose again. ' There is a man to die You have the heaviest arm under the sky.' ' My father dwells among the sea-worn bands And breaks the ridge of battle with his hands.' ' Nay, you are taller than Cuchulain, son. Death - poem by William Butler Yeats PoetryVerse William Butler Yeats Death Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all Many times he died, Many times rose again. If a man like that could look back on a lifetime of accomplishments and chalk them up to empty vanity, what hope is there for everyone else?Īt the same time, there’s something mesmerizing about watching a great man ripping his own ego to shreds.
After all, Yeats was a Nobel Prizewinner, an Irish senator, and a cofounder of his country’s national theater. This wasn’t far from the truth: Yeats spent his last decade carrying on with women half his age, and even had a vasectomy-like operation to improve his sexual “vigor.” (“When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs,” wrote Yeats’s much-younger wife, George, in a letter to her husband, “but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were.”)Īll these years later, the three poems are still deeply unsettling. By the end, he’s lying in a garbage pit filled with broken, hideous things: “Now that my ladder's gone, / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”Īnd in “Politics,” Yeats presents himself as a pathetic old man, lusting in vain after a younger woman. “My circus animals were all on show,” he writes, bitterly describing how he tried and failed to live up to his purest visions. In “The Circus Animal’s Desertion,” the poet mocks his entire career as a writer. The echo advises him, “Lay down and die.” Did that play of mine send out Certain men the English shot? Did words of mine put too great strain On that woman’s reeling brain? Could my spoken words have checked That whereby a house was wrecked? And all seems evil until I Sleepless would lay down and die. I lie awake night after night And never get the answers right. The Writers Almanac with Garrison Keillor: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by William Butler Yeats, and the literary and historical notes for.
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