Converse Truths

'In Memory of Major Robert Gregory' mentions "forgotten truth." The poems from 'The Tower' seem to remember these truths but approach them with a light heartedness. This attitude seems to arie from Yeats' enlarged perspective on the cycle of transient things whish he sums up in his reappearing symbol of the gyre. When younger and not yet embracing a view of all things as running paralelle and unceasing- a view adopted after he began utilizing a technique of automatic writing- Yeats' poems were more cynical and his view of aging and death were at times a terror and at times something to look forward to. His tone throughout the poems shows a new veiw that allows him to let go of a fear of death and an idea of a true end to things.
Sailing to Byzantium shows Yeats setting up this series of poems by describing his looking into the past since he now views it as necessarily connected to the present. In the first stanza he immediately sets up the same contrast between old and young, but the bird song commends both birth and death and the cycle of "begotten, born, and dies," is the cycle for all things. Yeats here admits that man, and he himself, at times fails to remember this. But in the second stanza we see Yeats study himself to reach Byzantium and in the third stanza he looks towards the external world to find his own soul and act within the gyre. This is significant in a form of synthesis, since so often in Yeats' earlier poems we see a disconnect between the external and the internal. By the end of the poem Yeats manages to portray this synthesis by asking to be made into a material thing.
"Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing
But such a form as Grecian goldsmith make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come."
By longing to be made into a staute he manages to create a symbol within the poem that embodies the material world but the material thing itself portrays myth. Yeats here fonds a way to incorporate the material world so to make himself into myth in order to spread his own mythology. After this poem he does just this. Throughout he likens himself to Homer and disavows long-standing philosophical beliefes, erecting his own.

We see that where change used to be source of pain to Yeats, he now celebrates it with lines from My Table such as
"No moon; only an aching heart
Concieves a changeless work of art."
This line manages to show his new attitude towards change as well as the inspiration for this attitude shift. The moon features strongly throughout Yeats' poems, but here begins to take on a new significance. His line breaks here are strongly intentional. That when at a phase in life where there is no moon, there is only an aching heart. Also that with out the changing phases of the moon life itself would be changeless, people would not progress or differentiate themselves. Therefore the aching heart that has no moon, or phase of moon to identify with, in their life would concieve of a changless art. This also incorporates a tone of self reflexivity. Since the tone of this book of poems has changed from his former writing.

In My Descendants we see Yeats give the image of the gyre a weighty meaning. Here we see him put a lot of stock into the future of his children and on his new idea of how the future relates to present and past.
"And what if my descendants lose the flower......
May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless ruin that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky."
This function to show that this literal flower, the roses in his garden, that he has found in his new abode and married life, used to exist only as a metaphor for him. Again Yeats has incorporated the tangible world into his world of symbols, and vice versa. At the end of the third stanza we see this by the way that Yeats uses the stones of the house to mimick the movement of the universe, and this way makes a monument out of them. Throughout these poems Yeats seems to making a monument to his new found thoughts.

At first glance I felt that The Wheel managed to fit in closely with other earlier poems by Yeats. It seems cynical and expresses a longing for death. Ultimately though I see the "longing for the tomb" in this poem as a releasing of transient things. As Yeats has accepted that things will go on and have gone on, and while living one longs for a time that is not the present, but that this too is part of the cyclical nature of things. He manages to express that all this looking forward means only looking towards death and that one must be able to cease this in order to accept the cycles that he sees all things embodying. All this shows an acceptance on the part of Yeats to incorporate the converse truths of his old age and his young, of the tangible world with the intangible and of his blood thirsty country men with himself.