STUFF TO MEMORISE!

Quotes & Techniques

An Irish Airmen Foresees his Death; Value for life, War, Death. 1916
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Somewhere among the clouds above Religious Allusion.

Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love. Anaphora

When You Are Old; Ageing, Love, Beauty, Change. Stratified 1891
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When you are old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book- and slowly
read. Enjambment Metaphor for literary greatness.
How many loved your moments of glad grace- and loved your beauty with love false or true. Alliteration
and Enjambment.
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled. Use of syntax suggesting transcendent qualities.

Among School Children; Ageing, Beauty, Change, Love 1928

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I dream of a Ledean body. Mythological allusion.

Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind and took a mess of shadows for its meet? Emphatic simile,
tone of abhorrence and disgust.
-Enough of that, better to smile on all that smile, and show there is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
Metaphor for himself being old and haggard.

The Wild Swans at Coole; Nature, Beauty, Change, Love 1917

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Under the October twilight the water- mirrors a still sky. Enjambment.
Comparing the human condition to the perfection and beauty of nature (in the way that it is simple).
Romantic outlook. Sublimity of nature.
Their hearts have not grown old. The swans are a motif symbolising fidelity, as swans are monogamous.

The Second Coming; Change (the Gyre), Violence 1919

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre. Models the gyre In terms of ones life. Extended metaphor.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Apathetic tone. Natural.
Matter of fact. Predisposition for this phenomenon to occur.
A shape with lion body and the head of a man. Allusion to Ancient Egyptian Sphinx.
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches
towards Bethlehem to be born?
Stanzas varying length. Haphazard rhyme scheme. Promotes the notion of the gyre.

We can trace in Yeats, the continually enriched and undeviating course of an inspired man, from earliest youth
to old age. Louise Bogan; 1938
Taking thought to adapt himself to middle age and find a different way of working. Balachandra Ragan 1965.
But he had to wait for later maturity to find expression of early experience, and this makes him a unique and
especially interesting poet. TS. Elliot.

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