Texts Continue to Be Valued by Different Audiences Because They offer Compelling Insights into Issues of Universal Significance.’ to What Extent Is This True of Your Personal Understanding of the Text You Have Studied for This Module?

‘Texts continue to be valued by different audiences because they offer compelling insights into issues of universal significance.’ To what extent is this true of your personal understanding of the text you have studied for this module?
By Luzelle Sotelo

Our understanding of W.B Yeats’ poetry is informed by my knowledge of the varied contextual influences, the public and the personal, that shape and inform the concerns of his poems and my interest in the diversity of humanist concerns expressed. It is clearly evident, that for some, the value of poetry lies in its ability to embody and reconcile the changing moral and political landscapes that frame their social consciousness. Compelling insights of universal significance can be seen in When You Are Old and Leda and the Swan, for in our contemporary society, it is clearly evident that the value of poetry is in its ability to be valued by different audiences.

The first stanza in When You Are Old sets the scene and immediately creates a soothing, thoughtful and dreamlike state. Yeats achieved this by careful word selection in his description of the future, and further using Pre-Raphaelite imagery and heavy use of commas, slows the pace of the poem, highlighting the implied regret, thus creating a vision of age and approaching death. As a transition from the first stanza into the second, she remembers her own ‘soft look’, ‘her eyes’ and ‘their shadows deep.’ The second stanza is an expression of the poet’s love for the persona, and reflects on the temporal nature of false love. The repetition of ‘loved’, the juxtaposition of the inverted syntax of the binary oppositions ‘love false or true’ employed by the poet to contrast the purity of his love, suggesting that love inspired by physical beauty is inferior to that of love invoked by the ‘pilgrim soul.’ The one man who foresees in her pilgrim soul, the inevitability of growing old, and is still willing to love her, is apparently rejected by her, possibly in favour of those who temporarily love her ‘grace’ and ‘beauty’. From this is implied regret, the sadness of missed opportunity in years that have slipped away.

The sensual imagery of the ‘glowing bars’ of the first, symbolic of the desire and need for the love once rejected. The verb ‘murmur’, and the adjective ‘a little sadly’ testify to the persona’s isolation. The regret of the persona is epitomised by the depiction of Love, capitalised as an absolute, fleeing this world of regret and resting in eternal beauty amongst the stars, an abstract image Romantic in sentiment and Celtic in symbolism. This combines with both the enjambment and the personification of love in the accumulation of ideas in the final couplet ‘and paced upon/and hid his face’ to convey the deep sense of loss and sorrow felt when denied. In our post-feminist age, Yeats’ representation of unrequited love may appear confronting, the feminist poet Adrienne Rich viewing him as an exemplary of the asymmetrical power relation between male and female object ‘reproached because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet’ (Rich). Ultimately, ageing and decline and the transience of life are fundamental to the human condition, thus Yeats’ exploration of compelling insights into issues of universal significance allow his poetry to be valued by different audiences.