Themes

The Relationship between Art and Politics

Yeats believed that art and politics were intrinsically linked and used his writing to express his attitudes toward
Irish politics, as well as to educate his readers about Irish cultural history. From an early age, Yeats felt a deep
connection to Ireland and his national identity, and he thought that British rule negatively impacted Irish politics
and social life. His early compilation of folklore sought to teach a literary history that had been suppressed by
British rule, and his early poems were Odes to the beauty and mystery of the Irish countryside. This work
frequently integrated references to myths and mythic figures, including Oisin and Cuchulain. As Yeats became
more involved in Irish politics—through his relationships with the Irish National Theatre, the Irish Literary
Society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and Maud Gonne—his poems increasingly resembled political
manifestos. Yeats wrote numerous poems about Ireland’s involvement in World War I (“An Irish Airman
Foresees His Death” [1919], “A Meditation in Time of War” [1921]), Irish nationalists and political activists
(“On a Political Prisoner” [1921], “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz” [1933]), and the
Easter Rebellion (“Easter 1916” [1916]). Yeats believed that art could serve a political function: poems could
both critique and comment on political events, as well as educate and inform a population.
The Impact of Fate and the Divine on History
Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the development of a unique spiritual and philosophical system that
emphasized the role of fate and historical determinism, or the belief that events have been preordained. Yeats
had rejected Christianity early in his life, but his lifelong study of mythology, Theosophy, spiritualism,
philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound interest in the divine and how it interacts with humanity.
Over the course of his life, he created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres
(similar to spiral cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul. Yeats believed that history
was determined by fate and that fate revealed its plan in moments when the human and divine interact.
A Tone of historically determined inevitability permeates his poems, particularly in descriptions of situations of
human and divine interaction. The divine takes on many forms in Yeats’s poetry, sometimes literally (“Leda
and the Swan” [1923]), sometimes abstractly (“The Second Coming” [1919]). In other poems, the divine is only
gestured to (as in the sense of the divine in the Byzantine mosaics in “Sailing to Byzantium” [1926]). No matter
what shape it takes, the divine signals the role of fate in determining the course of history.
The Transition from Romanticism to Modernism
Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. When he
began publishing poetry in the 1880s, his poems had a lyrical, romantic style, and they focused on love, longing
and loss, and Irish myths. His early writing follows the conventions of romantic verse, utilizing familiar rhyme
schemes, metric patterns, and poetic structures. Although it is lighter than his later writings, his early poetry is
still sophisticated and accomplished. Several factors contributed to his poetic evolution: his interest in
mysticism and the occult led him to explore spiritually and philosophically complex subjects. Yeats’s frustrated
romantic relationship with Maud Gonne caused the starry-eyed romantic idealism of his early work to become
more knowing and cynical. Additionally, his concern with Irish subjects evolved as he became more closely
connected to nationalist political causes. As a result, Yeats shifted his focus from myth and folklore to
contemporary politics, often linking the two to make potent statements that reflected political agitation and
turbulence in Ireland and abroad. Finally, and most significantly, Yeats’s connection with the changing face of
literary culture in the early twentieth century led him to pick up some of the styles and conventions of the
modernist poets. The modernists experimented with verse forms, aggressively engaged with contemporary
politics, challenged poetic conventions and the literary tradition at large, and rejected the notion that poetry
should simply be lyrical and beautiful. These influences caused his poetry to become darker, edgier, and more

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concise. Although he never abandoned the verse forms that provided the sounds and rhythms of his earlier
poetry, there is still a noticeable shift in style and tone over the course of his career.
Motifs
Irish Nationalism and Politics
Throughout his literary career, Yeats incorporated distinctly Irish themes and issues into his work. He used his
writing as a tool to comment on Irish politics and the home rule movement and to educate and inform people
about Irish history and culture. Yeats also used the backdrop of the Irish countryside to retell stories and legends
from Irish folklore. As he became increasingly involved in nationalist politics, his poems took on a patriotic
tone. Yeats addressed Irish politics in a variety of ways: sometimes his statements are explicit political
commentary, as in “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” in which he addresses the hypocrisy of the British
use of Irish soldiers in World War I. Such poems as “Easter 1916” and “In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con
Markiewicz” address individuals and events connected to Irish nationalist politics, while “The Second Coming”
and “Leda and the Swan” subtly include the idea of Irish nationalism. In these poems, a sense of cultural crisis
and conflict seeps through, even though the poems are not explicitly about Ireland. By using images of chaos,
disorder, and war, Yeats engaged in an understated commentary on the political situations in Ireland and
abroad. Yeats’s active participation in Irish politics informed his poetry, and he used his work to further
comment on the nationalist issues of his day.
Mysticism and the Occult
Yeats had a deep fascination with mysticism and the occult, and his poetry is infused with a sense of the
otherworldly, the spiritual, and the unknown. His interest in the occult began with his study of Theosophy as a
young man and expanded and developed through his participation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a
mystical secret society. Mysticism figures prominently in Yeats’s discussion of the reincarnation of the soul, as
well as in his philosophical model of the conical gyres used to explain the journey of the soul, the passage of
time, and the guiding hand of fate. Mysticism and the occult occur again and again in Yeats’s poetry, most
explicitly in “The Second Coming” but also in poems such as “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Magi” (1916).
The rejection of Christian principles in favor of a more supernatural approach to spirituality creates a unique
flavor in Yeats’s poetry that impacts his discussion of history, politics, and love.
Irish Myth and Folklore
Yeats’s participation in the Irish political system had origins in his interest in Irish myth and folklore. Irish myth
and folklore had been suppressed by church doctrine and British control of the school system. Yeats used his
poetry as a tool for re-educating the Irish population about their heritage and as a strategy for developing Irish
nationalism. He retold entire folktales in Epic poems and plays, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889)
and The Death of Cuchulain (1939), and used fragments of stories in shorter poems, such as “The Stolen Child”
(1886), which retells a parable of fairies luring a child away from his home, and “Cuchulain’s Fight with the
Sea” (1925), which recounts part of an epic where the Irish folk hero Cuchulain battles his long-lost son by at
the edge of the sea. Other poems deal with subjects, images, and themes culled from folklore. In “Who Goes
with Fergus?” (1893) Yeats imagines a meeting with the exiled wandering king of Irish legend, while “The
Song of Wandering Aengus” (1899) captures the experiences of the lovelorn god Aengus as he searches for the
beautiful maiden seen in his dreams. Most important, Yeats infused his poetry with a rich sense of Irish culture.
Even poems that do not deal explicitly with subjects from myth retain powerful tinges of indigenous Irish
culture. Yeats often borrowed word selection, verse form, and patterns of Imagery directly from traditional
Irish myth and folklore.
Symbols
The Gyre
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The gyre, a circular or conical shape, appears frequently in Yeats’s poems and was developed as part of the
philosophical system outlined in his book A Vision. At first, Yeats used the phases of the moon to articulate his
belief that history was structured in terms of ages, but he later settled upon the gyre as a more useful model. He
chose the image of interlocking gyres—visually represented as two intersecting conical spirals—to symbolize
his philosophical belief that all things could be described in terms of cycles and patterns. The soul (or the
civilization, the age, and so on) would move from the smallest point of the spiral to the largest before moving
along to the other gyre. Although this is a difficult concept to grasp abstractly, the image makes sense when
applied to the waxing and waning of a particular historical age or the evolution of a human life from youth to
adulthood to old age. The symbol of the interlocking gyres reveals Yeats’s belief in fate and historical
determinism as well as his spiritual attitudes toward the development of the soul, since creatures and events
must evolve according to the conical shape. With the image of the gyre, Yeats created a shorthand reference in
his poetry that stood for his entire philosophy of history and spirituality.
The Swan
Swans are a common Symbol in poetry, often used to depict idealized nature. Yeats employs this convention in
“The Wild Swans at Coole” (1919), in which the regal birds represent an unchanging, flawless ideal. In “Leda
and the Swan,” Yeats rewrites the Greek myth of Zeus and Leda to comment on fate and historical inevitability:
Zeus disguises himself as a swan to rape the unsuspecting Leda. In this poem, the bird is fearsome and
destructive, and it possesses a divine power that violates Leda and initiates the dire consequences of war and
devastation depicted in the final lines. Even though Yeats clearly states that the swan is the god Zeus, he also
emphasizes the physicality of the swan: the beating wings, the dark webbed feet, the long neck and beak.
Through this description of its physical characteristics, the swan becomes a violent divine force. By rendering a
well-known poetic symbol as violent and terrifying rather than idealized and beautiful, Yeats manipulates poetic
conventions, an act of literary modernism, and adds to the power of the poem.
The Great Beast
Yeats employs the figure of a great beast—a horrific, violent animal—to embody difficult abstract concepts.
The great beast as a symbol comes from Christian iconography, in which it represents evil and darkness. In
“The Second Coming,” the great beast emerges from the Spiritus Mundi, or soul of the universe, to function as
the primary image of destruction in the poem. Yeats describes the onset of apocalyptic events in which the
“blood-dimmed tide is loosed” and the “ceremony of innocence is drowned” as the world enters a new age and
falls apart as a result of the widening of the historical gyres. The speaker predicts the arrival of the Second
Coming, and this prediction summons a “vast image” of a frightening monster pulled from the collective
consciousness of the world. Yeats modifies the well-known image of the sphinx to embody the poem’s vision of
the climactic coming. By rendering the terrifying prospect of disruption and change into an easily imagined
horrifying monster, Yeats makes an abstract fear become tangible and real. The great beast slouches toward
Bethlehem to be born, where it will evolve into a second Christ (or anti-Christ) figure for the dark new age. In
this way, Yeats uses distinct, concrete imagery to symbolize complex ideas about the state of the modern world.
The Second Coming
"The Second Coming" is about a rapidly changing world, altered forever by violence and chaos. The poem's
first line, which mentions a "widening gyre," refers to Yeats' belief (which he expanded on in a later book
called A Vision) that the world was created by a series of interlocking circles, spinning into each other and
winding around each other to catalyze existence. The poem's first line implies that something is turning and
changing within the universe. This first line serves to create a sense of mystery from the poem's very beginning;
it is obscure and complex, ominous withholding of any clues about what might be happening. It also expands
the poem's scale, making it clear that the poem is really addressing events on a cosmological scale.

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With high stakes and a cosmological scale established in the first line, the poem goes on to deepen this
ambiguity in the second line. At first glance, it appears to mourn the fact that the "falcon," or humanity, has
been separated from its falconer—from its God or ethics or morals. On the other hand, Yeats expressed his
admiration for wild birds in other poems, like "The Wild Swans at Coole," and certainly he himself was
uninterested in convention and order, having broken from his Christian upbringing to pursue occult leanings. He
was even expelled from the London Theological Society because he refused to follow their rules. Usually,
people interpret "The Second Coming" as mourning the loss of order, in which case the falcon's being separated
from the falconer would be an example of this collapse. But perhaps, through this line, Yeats is implying that
the Second Coming means that the falcon is at last free—and the world has broken from its past traditions of
convention and restraint, and it can move into a new era, discovering new freedoms and new possibilities.
In the third line, the phrase "the centre cannot hold" implies that the core or heart of the world is falling apart, so
something once seen as fundamental to the world is changing forever. Yeats uses the word "loosed" twice to
describe the onset of the violent changes occurring, evoking an uncontrollable burst of fury; something is
coming unfurled, unclenched, opening, falling, melting—slouching. A collapse is coming. This could lead to a
new coming-together, a new unity; but most likely will lead to uncontrollable, possibly dangerous, possibly
liberating changes.
Many Yeats scholars believe that this poem is specifically about the Russian Revolution of 1917, also known as
the Bolshevik Revolution, which resulted in a bloody seven-year war that paved the way for the rise of the
Communist party in Russia; it also certainly has echoes of World War I, which rocked the world to its core. But
perhaps Yeats could see even further. Perhaps he could somehow sense the coming of further wars and
violences—World War II, the atomic bomb, technologies that would reshape the world from the ground up. He
knew the world would never be the same after the 20th century, and it certainly is not.

Yeats gives a name to this whole series of events, placing them under the umbrella of a "Second Coming." But
instead of a second appearance of Christ, this event will be a birth of a creature as significant as Christ, who will
completely alter the state of the world just as Christ did—but who will operate in a completely different way
than the world has been operating since Christ arrived and civilization began to form.

The second half of the poem finds Yeats delving into mythological imagery through occult methods. Yeats
believed that all humans share a common, vast memory, populated by universal archetypes and myths. This
collective consciousness or Spiritus Mundi, also described as the Oversoul by Carl Jung, is the source of the
bizarre, apocalyptic imagery that leads the poem to its conclusion. The speaker descends into a bizarre vision,
observing a sphinx staring cruelly at him in a desert, moving its thighs slowly and almost sexually, perhaps
offering him the clues to understanding what is happening around him while also embodying primal, ancient
ways of being and creative, fertile energies that represent a potential union and rebirth.
When he reemerges from the vision, the speaker reenters reality, having totally departed from it temporarily.
The poem ends where it began: in a haze of ominous foreshadowing, the specter of a looming monster of the
future rapidly approaching, the universe spinning and growing into something different than it was. Whether
that future is an evil mess of pure chaos, or whether it will offer some sort of freedom and possibility, remains
undecided.

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