Now I May Wither into the Truth: Re-reading Some Poems of W. B. Yeatsin the Middle Phase

The poetry of W. B. Yeats covers almost three distinctive and successive periods in the history of English literature such as the late Victorian, Edwardian and the Modern period and the poetic stature he attained in due course virtually shows a zodiac range of interests expressed with a correspondingly strenuous maturity in form and style spanning over decades. The greatness of Yeats’ poetry lies in the simple fact that he could successfully integrate thoughts, feelings and ideas into a coherent body of experience. Apparently, the initial beginning of the poet in the fashion of the romantics and Pre-Raphaelites with an emerging drift to realism in the middle phase, hardly gives any hint of the complexity of Yeats’ major poems where the persona represents divergent claims to consciousness typical of a poetic universe (constituted mainly by three practical passions in his life, viz, poetry, love and Irish nationalism) which reserves room both for the crisp and the casual; the regal and the ribald; the mundane and the mysterious. However, a meticulous reading of Yeats’ poetry reveals a thorough progress towards making poetry not only a natural utterance for the poet, but also a symbol of a coveted identity - a ‘Unity of Being’ – an ideal which, for example, breathtakingly comes close to realization in a seminal piece like Sailing to Byzantium. The present article focuses on some poems taken from the middle period of Yeats’ poetry so as to trace an element of continuity in the Yeatsian poetics.