Setting and identity- 1/28

Perhaps after reading Malcolm Brown's The Politics of Irish Literature and then a brief history of Ireland I find my focus to be preoccupied with the geography of Ireland. Therefore I am focused on the role of physical setting in Yeats' poems. It seemed that often times nature, internal and external, as well the thresholds between the nature of these two settings, dictated moods, sanity, and circumstance. King Goll's madness manifests itself throughout Yeats' poem in the repetition of the leaves that will not hush. Finally this madness comes to fruition as King Goll leaves his men in favor of nature so that eventually in the solitude of wilderness:
"the grey wolf knows me; by one ear
I lead along the woodland deer;
The hare runs along me growing bold."

More prominently than 'The Madness of King Goll,' I saw 'To an Isle in the Water' as a poem that adds dimensions to Yeats' focus on the physicality of Ireland. Not only does the isle itself speak of Ireland as a real place, but the "shy one" can be seen as the essence of this isle. It speaks of a longing to bring Ireland to itself. Yet within this poem we see the "shy one" unable to enter the lighted internal space, but standing "in gloom" at the doorway, "pensively apart." Much as Ireland is from the continent nearest it.

In 'The Ballad of Moll Magee' we see Yeats, again, writing about a woman, but this time as her, rather than longing for her. What struck me about this poem was lines such as, "No neighbor could I see" or the repetitive mention of shut doors and silence. This signifies a certain focus that Yeats has with internal and external spaces which stands out as his own strife in assimilating, or unifying, his thoughts and the parts of his person, or more, an Irishman.

It wasn't until I read 'The Lake of Innisfree' that I was overwhelmed by the Rousseau-ian ideas that Yeats seems to have agreed with. That to find isolation and live a simple, more primitive life would be a solution to modernity's problems is what Yeats longs for here. His hearing water wherever he is draws attention to his focus on the physical limits of Ireland as being an island. The feeling is that, although he inhabits an island, he cannot find isolation. While this poem, as well as the others, manage to talk of Ireland constantly, we see here, stronger than elsewhere, his own struggle at identifying as Irish and yet longing to throw off Dublin's metropolitan life and embrace an Ireland he never knew and perhaps exists only as myth perpetuated by a people who feel they lost the essence of what Irish is.

'Who goes with Fergus' stands out as a similarly natural poem in which Yeats looks at "pierc(ing) the wood's woven shade" as a form of liberation from fears. But it is 'The Man who dreamed of Fearyland' that manages to turn this idea of nature's liberation on its head. In this poem nature offers an idea of a mythical and unattainable life that a man wanders dreaming of. The songs of animals tells the man of a world unlike his own which makes him discontented, much as the Irish people are discontented with their loss of a mystical Ireland they have been denied by the British. At his entrance into sleep and his waking, is the only time we know the man of this poem and we see Yeats feel bitter at the sun as the destroyer of dreams. This poem stands out as Yeats' dissillusionment with an ideal of a better world and nature in perpetuating this ideal becomes an object of disdain. The weight of this culminates in the last line where even in the next life, this man can find no comfort.

In the juxtaposition of nature and industrialization, open and closed spaces, as well as the rising and setting of the sun, we begin to see Yeats' identity as a person and an Irish man begin to flesh out. His own conflict becomes clear and the conflict of his country becomes clear through his own turmoil.