By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ stands, in many ways, as W. B. Yeats’s swansong. It was the final major poem published in his last volume of poems, which appeared the year before he died in 1939. But what is ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ about? The poem doesn’t offer its meaning or meanings up to us easily, so it requires some close analysis to unpick.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ is one of W. B. Yeats’s best-known poems: it is simultaneously both a war poem and a poem about Irishness, and yet, at the same time, neither of these. To unpick these paradoxes, a bit of analysis of the poem is required.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) wrote ‘Easter 1916’ in the summer of 1916, shortly after the Easter Rising in Dublin and when the events were still fresh in the memory. Yeats had conflicted feelings towards the rising – more details about which can be read here – since he deplored violence (in most cases) as a way of achieving Irish independence from the British.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was a prolific Irish poet, but what were his best poems? It’s going to prove difficult to restrict our choices to just ten of Yeats’s greatest poems, as there are bound to be notable absences from our list. Nevertheless, all ten of the poems listed here give an insight into the most prevalent themes of Yeats’s poetry.
An analysis of a short Yeats poem by Dr Oliver Tearle
‘Death’ is not perhaps numbered among the most famous poems by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), but it is probably the shortest of all his finest poems. In just a dozen lines, Yeats examines human attitudes to death, contrasting them with an animal’s ignorance of its own mortality. ‘Death’ was written in 1929 and included in Yeats’s 1933 volume The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Here is ‘Death’, followed by a few words by way of analysis.
Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;