Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939)

William Butler Yeats, Irish playwright and poet, was brought up in Dublin and London and became among the foremost writers of the modernist movement in 20th-century literature. Deeply involved with the Irish literary revival, he took an active part in the creation of an Irish literary theater. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. Well aware of the accelerating pace with which the world around him was changing and being a nationalist and a conservative, Yeats was known for his desire to maintain the traditional forms of society and government that he ardently supported.

One of his best-known poems, “The Second Coming,” reveals Yeats's belief that history and time are cyclic. The poem describes the destruction of the ruling monarchy as part of an unavoidable collapse of the world order as he knew it. Describing chaos and violence as a product of the foreseen rift in ways of old, the piece concludes with a famous line conveying his belief that the disorder creeping across modern life would give birth to a new beginning, as with the times preceding the birth of Christianity: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Yeats's poem “The Lake Isle of Inisfree” expresses the speaker's desire to abandon modern society with its hurried pace and retreat to a tranquil island. The poem's narrator uses this reflection on an uninhabited island as a stolen moment to escape the onrush of a quickly developing civilization. Describing his island refuge, Yeats writes, “And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow.” The speaker resolves that this quiet life is a mere musing and that such isolation is not something easily found. Writing “while I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core,” Yeats reminds readers of the ever-present asphalt world that surrounds us. Retreat to a state of isolation offers the promise of escape from a world that is growing and changing too fast.

Years after the poem's publication, Yeats reflected that the idea for “The Lake Isle of Inisfree” came to him as he paused on the sidewalk of a busy street. Peering into a shop window, he saw an advertisement meant to draw a rushed passerby's attention with a metal ball suspended on a jet of water in a fountain. The lazy trickle of water and simplicity of the attraction moved Yeats; time seemed to slow down, and the reverie he experienced inspired thoughts of a simpler time and place.

Yeats died in France in 1939, and 9 years later his remains were transported to his final resting place in Ireland. His headstone displays a short excerpt from one of his final poems, “Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman pass by!” Readers of his epitaph are advised to look on both life and death with equanimity, to continue on their way and not dwell on the end of life but rather go on living it.

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