Yeats and Youth

Many of Yeats’s poems in In the Seven Woods concern themselves with transition - from either day to night or from young beauty to age. Images of the moon are frequent and lend themselves to a dreamlike quality. This makes sense in light of Ellmann’s chapter on Yeats’s early life, which speaks of his constant desire to daydream. There is both a sense of decline and cyclical nature embodied in these poems.

‘The Old Men admiring Themselves in the Water’ relates to the way Ellmann describes Yeats’s insecurity with his youth. Probably due to his father’s insistence on education and Yeats feeling that he was just not quite smart enough (failing to have high enough marks for admission into Trinity) may have lead him to equate wisdom with age. In my opinion, the theme and sentiment of this poem is a little tired, however I do find its sound quite beautiful. The way Yeats maintains a subtle rhyme throughout the poem and the repeating sound of ‘waters’ mimics the sound of the drifting water itself.

Ellmann says that Yeats believed that “words are not merely signs of things, but things themselves.” In ‘Old Memory,’ however Yeats seems to speak of the inadequacy of words when he says, “Through the long years of youth, and who would have though it all, and more than it all, would come to naught, and that dear words meant nothing?”
Perhaps Yeats is speaking about the emptiness of words uttered or written in the past because one has become so far removed from them that they do not exist in the same way – only in “old memory.” Or (maybe grasping for straws here) the “her” who is spoken of in the beginning of the poem is Ireland and she is stuck focusing on the past that it leaves her incapacitated in the present.

QUESTIONS:

- Does the content of this collection of Yeats’s poems match up with his ambition? Or do some fall short?
- Is there anything about these poems that is undeniably Yeats? If not, does that matter?