On the same day that I emerged into this world, but one hundred and seventeen years back, was born one of English literature’s greatest exponents, William Butler Yeats. He is considered as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in the year 1923. He was also an Irish nationalist, dramatist, prose writer and a believer in eastern mysticism. It was with great amusement that I found out, of late, that my most favourite poet was born exactly on the same date as I.
William Butler Yeats was born on 13th June, 1865 in Dublin, Ireland. His father, John Butler Yeats was a well known painter and his mother Susan Mary Pollexfen came from a rich Anglo-Irish family in Sligo. In 1885, Yeats’ first set of poems was published in Dublin University Review. It was in 1889 that WB Yeats met Maud Gonne, a young heiress who had dedicated her life to Irish nationalist movement. Yeats developed an infatuation and a great love towards Maud Gonne and he proposed her, but she refused as she thought Yeats to be a lesser revolutionary than what she was. As is the case with many poets, Yeats also gained a lot of ‘inspiration’, if you can call it so, from his lost love. There onwards this incident had a great impact on his poems and the world should be grateful to Maud Gonne for refusing Yeats’ proposal because if she had not done that we would have never got such great poems from this great Irishman.
To all those people who have been in love for a long time but haven’t got it reciprocated from the other side, Yeats gave his advice thus,
O do not love too long, Or you will grow out of fashion, Like an old song.
Yeats was so much upset with his lost love that in almost all his poems we can see a glimpse of his disappointment. In what is considered as one of the greatest love poems ever written in the English language, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven”, Yeats said,
I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
WB Yeats believed that his love for Maud Gonne was a very sincere one. But in the latter part of his life he had the conviction that Maud Gonne had never taken his love seriously. He came to understand that though his love for Ms. Gonne was a sincere one, she never had the same feeling for him. As a reply to, what he considered as her infidelity, Yeats later wrote,
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, With her did not agree.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, And now am full of tears.
Though he was rather passionate about the beauty of Maud Gonne in his youthful days, he became more aware of the futility of beauty in his old age. In his poem “A Prayer for my Daughter” he brought out his scepticism about extreme beauty, as he believed that if someone is extremely beautiful, there is a chance for that person to get obsessed with beauty and lose his/her natural kindness. He said,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
Yeats also had other shades to his personality. He was a revolutionary and stood for Irish nationalism and had been appointed in the Irish Senate in the year 1922. In his poem named “The Second Coming” he represents the political condition of his times in the words,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Yeats died on 28 January, 1939 and his tomb is at Drumcliffe, County Sligo, Ireland. I would consider this to be a small introduction to the poetry of WB Yeats and to all those poem enthusiasts out there, I would recommend to read Yeats. Anyways I am extremely proud and feel privileged to share my birthday with William Butler Yeats. Two other great men who share the same birthday are the Communist intellectual EMS and one of the greatest Malayalam satirist-writer, Mannikoth Ramunni Nair a.k.a. Sanjayan.
(Republished from Vox SEO, the SEO writing forum in Calpine Technologies)
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