Essays on Yeats

Part 1

In “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning we meet the narrator who is a Duke. The duke is meeting an emissary in order to discuss marrying the daughter of a very important man. As he is giving the emissary a tour of his home he stops to admire the portrait of his dead wife. The Duke begins to speak of his dead wife with affection. This quickly turns into bitterness when he goes on a rant about the fact she engaged in behaviors that he found distasteful. As he goes on he reveals that he “gave commands; / Then ...

Three poems, which have been chosen for this paper: “Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson, “A Supermarket in California” by Allen Ginsberg, and “Sailing to Byzantium” by W. B. Yeats, are all very different and belong to different literary trends. However, they all are focused on the subject of death, which they depict from different standpoints, systems of beliefs, and values. In the first poem, “Because I could not stop for Death”, Emily Dickinson describes death using the image of a gentleman, who takes her into his carriage: “He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage” ( ...

1. Why Hedda Gabler and not Hedda Tesman? Hedda belongs to the bourgeois class of her society. Using Hedda Gabler instead of Hedda Tesman is meant to show the audience how Ibsen's main protagonist prefers to identify herself. Hedda is the daughter of a general who ends up marrying into a lower class thereby lowering her social status. However, she still wants to identify herself as an aristocrat. People in Hedda's society enjoy privileges according to their social status. Belonging to the bourgeois class means that she does not enjoy as many benefits as she would enjoy under the ...

Response #1

Giddings, Franklin. The Relation of the Criminal to Society. Proceedings of the Academy of

Political Science in the City of New York 1(4), 1911, 559-62.

This article asserts that some of the acts that the legislature defines as crimes are not actions that can cause much harm to the society and future generations, but there are acts that are defined as crimes that pose grave dangerous. Accordingly, the author notes that if one assumes that every person who commits a crime is a criminal then it is hard to find a person who is not a criminal in the United States. In this regard, the article presents two kinds of ‘ ...

Summary of the poem “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats "The Second Coming" is one of the most famous and frequently quoted poems in the Western literature. Obviously, the title refers to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to Earth at the Last Judgment. In the first stanza, Yeats describes the anarchy and disorder in the world. Chaos rules everywhere, there are no settled rules or laws: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

He makes a reference to a Baptist cleansing ritual: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”. The ritual purifies a person, who is welcomed to church. ...

Chinua Achebe manages, in a highly entertaining and educative way, to present the theme of collectivism in the Nigeria before the merciless yet highly effective occupation of the British in Nigeria. The Ibo society that forms the setting of the book is a microcosm of not just Nigeria but also the rest of the Eastern countries. Chinua Achebe tells the story of the people of Igbo land of Eastern Nigeria before and immediately after their contact with the Western culture. The story revolves around the life of Okwonkwo, a tragic hero, depicting his birth, how he rises from a ...

Comparison of W.H. Auden and John Dryden One of the differences in the stylistic choices of the two poets is the use of rhyme. In his elegy, John Dryden employs a rhyme scheme after every two sentences throughout the poem.

Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place, While his young friend perform'd and won the race. O early ripe! to thy abundant store What could advancing age have added more?. (Dryden) As seen in the first six lines of the poem, every two sentences maintain the same rhyme scheme. John Dryden employs an intricate and deliberate choice of words ...

Irish Drama: Comparing Two Plays

British literary landscape has long been diligently adorned and complemented by the magnificent works of Irish authors, all of them mirroring the peculiar culture, mentality and traditions of the people. In Irish literary legacy, dramaturgy is a remarkable genre, while history and myths are the common thematic aspects of the works. Interestingly, due to the complex historical background of Ireland and its Northern part, one could draw parallels even between seemingly different plays separated by decades. A good example is observed in a kind of symbolic interplay between the plays Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme ...

When we speak of the Irish Renaissance, we can also be referring to a Celtic Renaissance. We call it the Irish Renaissance because it was championed principally by Irish writers, one of which, at least, used the Celtic tradition to invigorate the Renaissance. Ireland at the turn of the 20th century was mired in passions. Rebellion was always on the horizon, economic collapse was always imminent, the catastrophe of the Potato Famine was still a racial memory, and the rule of the English was still unbearable. From this potentially destructive social structure came some of the finest writing of ...

World literature

One of the clearest and most significant associations with the world of Ireland is the poetry written by William Butler Yeats “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”. The poem Irish in origin by its form is the ordinary visualization of the peaceful life of the author which characterizes not writer`s feeling, but his life and carrier as well. The poem was written by William Butler Yeats in London when walking down the street he passed some shops with murmuring small waterfall in the shop windows to attract the buyers. He suddenly remembered the lake near Sligo, the place where ...