This blog is reaponse of Thinking Activity given by Professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir here I discuss about the questions of W B Yeats poems.
William Butler Yeats
Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London.He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Irish Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty.
Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of seventy-three.
1, Pendemic Reading of 'The Second Coming'
Ans, 
The second coming poem
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
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.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
About The Poem
The Second Coming" is one of W.B. Yeats's most famous poems. Written in 1919 soon after the end of World War I, it describes a deeply mysterious and powerful alternative to the Christian idea of the Second Coming—Jesus's prophesied return to the Earth as a savior announcing the Kingdom of Heaven. The poem's first stanza describes a world of chaos, confusion, and pain. The second, longer stanza imagines the speaker receiving a vision of the future, but this vision replaces Jesus's heroic return with what seems to be the arrival of a grotesque beast. With its distinct imagery and vivid description of society's collapse, "The Second Coming" is also one of Yeats's most quoted poems.
The second coming as pendemic Poem:
The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic: In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees caught the virus and was very close to death. William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" a hundred years ago, when the world seemed on the verge.The losses of the First World War were still overwhelming when millions more began to die in the waves of a flu pandemic, which infected Yeats's wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, while she was pregnant. She and their child would survive.
This is a poem that has borrowed its title from W. B Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’, explaining the serious consequences of COVID-19 pandemic on human life.In this poem poet talk about the flu virus and this is might be related with our present because in now days we suffering from corona virus and for few days we find new Virus. So thing is that that time and this time is same. In flu Yeats lost his wife. And we also lost our lot's of people in this pandemic situation. There is no particular virus in poem but because of virus he lost his wife.
So we might be considered this poem as pandemic poem.
2, Critical analysis of any other poem written by W.B.Yeats.
Ans,
The Lake Isle Of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core
Analysis of the poem
Ist Stanza - Speaker describes physical location, on Innisfree, where he will live alone in a self-made cabin.
2nd Stanza - All the qualities of this new life are stated. Speaker needs peace. The pace of life will be slower, Nature will take over.
3rd Stanza - Reiterates need to fulfil the wish. Even as he stands in the traffic, amongst the crowds, he longs for that idyllic island on the lough.
The Lake Isle Of Innisfree is perhaps the best known of all Yeats' poems. It has been a popular choice of anthologists since it was first published in 1890 and has made Innisfree, a tiny island in lough Gill in County Sligo, Ireland, now a place of pilgrimage.
This green and watery landscape is where the young Yeats spent time as a child and the idyllic imagery remained strong in his memory. He wrote the poem when he was in his early 20s, stuck in the metropolis of London, homesick, struggling to get his name known and his poems out in suitable form.
When Innisfree was finished, Yeats finally declared that it was 'my first lyric with any thing in its rhythm of my own music.'
It had taken him a long time to complete the poem. Originally it had a different rhythm and many more syllables in long rambling lines but, with perserverance and skill, he cut and polished the lines to reach a final successful outcome.
As he matured however, he became disenchanted with his earlier work, including Innisfree, and said to his publisher in 1920 that 'the popular poems I wrote before I knew better' ought to be included in an anthology about to be published, to maximise sales. Yeats thought that his celtic period, so called, was not modern or cutting edge enough.
Yet he still did important readings in the 1930s of this poem and others written at around the same time. His highly formal aging voice can be heard on the BBC as he reads out the lines with 'great emphasis on the rhythm'. Seamus Heaney thought the readings were great, saying that Yeats' speaking voice was like an 'elevated chant.'
Some poets, and many people, will always yearn for quiet, out of the way places, where noise, pollution and crowds do not exist. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, with its Irish folk resonance and liturgical undercurrents, taps into the soul's desire for peace, harmony and natural surroundings.
The Lake Isle of Innisfree is a three stanza poem, each quatrain made up of three long lines and one short. The rhyme scheme is abab and all end rhymes are full. This brings a sense of closure and order.
Thank you
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