A Study of W.B. Yeats’s Poem “Words”

Ipatia Apostolides

May 10, 2020

The Irish poet Yeats and his poem “Words” will be addressed in this paper. First, I will briefly cover Yeats’s biography, including his formative years, Ireland’s influence, his friends, and his primary love interest, Maud Gonne. This will be followed by a study of Yeats’s poem “Words” that was published in The Green Helmet and Other Poems in 1910 (Finneran, 2002). The poem relates to his personal life, particularly his love for Maud Gonne, and it gives us a glimpse of his use of the mask of change, rhythm, and symbolism. I will also touch briefly upon the societal influence in his work.

Biography

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin in 1865 to John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen (Duane, 1997; Brown, 1999). His father, a barrister, abandoned his profession and moved his family to London to become an artist but had difficulty providing for the expanding family. Yeats spent his youth between London and Sligo, his mother’s country home. Yeats met the poet George Russell at the Metropolitan School of Art where they became friends and had a mutual respect for the occult. During that time, Yeats decided that he preferred poetry over art. Yeats also joined the Dublin Hermetic Society and the Contemporary Club made up of intellectuals who studied magic and the esoteric. There he met John O’Leary who appreciated his genius. That is when Yeats began to study Irish history in earnest. Several of his poems were published in the Dublin University Review (Archibald, 1983).

Yeats’s interaction with the sexes was a source of energy to his writing (Hynes, 1977). This became evident when Yeats wrote the following in a letter late in his life: “We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with.” Yeats was to have several relationships with women, but the woman that affected him the most was Maud Gonne.

Yeats met Maud Gonne in 1889 when she visited his family; he accepted an invitation to dine with her the next day, and he did this nearly every evening until she left for Paris (Bradford, 1962). An actress, Maud Gonne was tall and beautiful, and fiercely intent on Ireland being free from Britain. Yeats proposed to her several times, but she turned him down each time. She confessed at one point about her past, where she had been a mistress to a French man and had two children by him (Bradford, 1962; Brown, 1999). He also proposed to her daughter but was turned down.

Another important woman in his life was Lady Gregory of Coole Park. A widow of two years, she met Yeats in London in 1894; she became like a surrogate mother to him, tending to him and giving him access to her rural home at Coole (Bradford, 1962). He visited the estate during the summers to work on his writing. He also wrote plays, and they collaborated in forming a theater together (Brown, 1999). 

With Maud Gonne, however, Yeats was obsessed by her, and she showed up in many of his poems (Bradford, 1962). She refused to say “yes” to his marriage proposals; she told him that she could never marry him due to her “horror and terror of physical love” (Bradford, 1962). Yet, somehow this fear did not fit with her actual life; she had been a mistress before she met Yeats and had two children, and in 1903 she had married John MacBride and had a son, but with Yeats, she could only have a spiritual relationship where they met on an astral plane. Even after she became widowed in 1916, she refused to marry him (Brown, 1999). Eventually, Yeats married Georgina Hyde Lees in 1917; she was much younger than him, and they had two children together. In 1923, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he also became a Senator in the Irish Free State.

“Words” Poem

Yeats’ poem “Words” was first published in The Green Helmet and Other Poems, (1910; as cited in Finneran, 2002):

WORDS

I had this thought a while ago,

‘My darling cannot understand

What have I done, or what would do

In this blind bitter land.’

And I grew weary of the sun

Until my thoughts cleared up again,

Remembering that the best I have done

Was done to make it plain;

That every year I have cried, ‘At length

My darling understands it all,

Because I have come into my strength,

And words obey my call’;

That had she done so who can say

What would have shaken from the sieve?

I might have thrown poor words away 

And been content to live (p. 36).

This traditional rhyming poem is iambic tetrameter for the first three lines of each stanza with eight syllables, while the last line of each stanza ends with an iambic trimeter of six syllables. In order to maintain the rhythmic eight syllables per line, some of his words, as in stanza 2, line 3, had to be tightened. For example, “Remembering that the best I have done” is 10 syllables, and it has to be crammed into eight syllables. So the word “remembering” could be tightened to “rememb’ring,” and “the best I have done” could be tightened to “the best I’ve done.” This way it phonetically complied with the traditional iambic meter. 

In this passage in 1900, he explained the role of rhythm in his writing (Finneran, 2002):

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in the state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols (p. 378).

Personal Implications 

In Yeats’s poem “Words,” he used a first-person point of view which gives it a personal touch. The poet was inviting us into his private world by beginning with “I had this thought a while ago.” It’s as if he were treating us like a friend. According to Harper (2007), “Yeats’s work is intensely interested in someone we can call Yeats.” It is obviously the case in this poem.

Morrall (1956) believed that the art and personality of Yeats was combined intimately as one, and this made a “more lasting appeal to the human heart.” In addition, Yeats took his personal relationship with Maud Gonne, one filled with private thoughts, and made it public in this poem. How does one know it was Maud Gonne? Although he didn’t mention her name in this poem, the “My darling” in the second line of the poem is revealed in the following diary entry by Yeats in 1909, where PIAL was the code for Maud Gonne (Brown, 1999):

Today the thought came to me that PIAL never really understood my plans, or nature, or ideas. Then came the thought, what matter? How much of the best I have done and still do is but the attempt to explain myself to her? If she understood, I should lack a reason for writing, and one never can have too many reasons for doing what is so laborious (p.176).

In this diary entry, Yeats made it clear that Maud Gonne did not understand him. By this time in his life, she had been separated by her husband for four years and was raising her son. Although he had had other love relationships, he repeatedly returned to Gonne, asking her to marry him, but she spurned him each time (Brown, 1999). 

In the first stanza of his poem “Words,” he stated: “My darling cannot understand/What have I done, or what would do” (Finneran, 2002). But what was it that she needed to understand? The title “Words” gives a hint. She did not understand his writing. Yeats’s writing was important to him, and he had attained recognition for his poetry and plays by this time in his life. He strived to “make it plain” to her in the second stanza. By the third stanza of the poem, he had cried every year “At length/ My darling understands it all” believing the reason being that “I have come into my strength/And words obey my call.” Then retracting these thoughts in the last stanza, “That had she done so who can say/What would have shaken from the sieve?” he wondered again if she had actually understood him, thus by asking this question, he exposed an insecurity toward her. 

At the same time, he revealed his own awareness of wanting to impress her with his writing. If Maude would have given Yeats what he wanted in the poem, which was not only her love, but her whole being and her recognition for his talent and writing, then things would have changed for him. In “I might have thrown poor words away,” Yeats showed how her actions would have influenced him (Finneran, 2002). But that was not the case in real life.

I believe that in this poem, Yeats also revealed the de-selfing of the self where he “constructs the self and then deserts it” (Harper, 2007). He came into his strength where “words obey my call” which appeared to be the construction of the self, and then he deserted it in the last stanza (if she had understood him) with “And been content to live.” Another revelation into his personal life is from his “Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1918), where Yeats wrote: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry” (as cited in Finneran, 2002). The two juxtapositions in his poem – his wanting her to understand, and what would have happened if she did understand - reveal his angst at her not understanding him, and at the same time the “quarrel” with himself.

Societal Framework

According to the Poets.org website (W.B. Yeats, n.d.) Yeats was born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class. He became involved with the Celtic Revival, resisting the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland, and promoting Ireland’s heritage through his writing. Yeats’s writing was influenced by Irish mythology, faeries, and folklore. He liked to use symbolism and rhythm. He also dabbled in the occult. (Finneran, 2002).

During the writing of the poem, there was a feeling of unrest in Ireland, as depicted in the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne’s nationalistic stance in wanting Ireland to be freed from Britain. In addition to what was happening politically around him and Ireland, poetry during this time, had been moving from romanticism and naturalism toward modernism, but Yeats was resisting that change in his poetry (Barsky, 2015). He continued to churn out traditional poems like “Words” that rhymed and had very little concrete images except for “land, “sun,” and “sieve.” However, after 1910, his work began to reflect the influence of Ezra Pound, and it became more modern, concise, and filled with imagery (Finneran, 2002). Yet a part of him resisted; Yeats continued to use traditional rhyming verse in his poems. 

In the “Words” poem, Yeats mentioned how his darling could not understand what he would do in “this blind, bitter land” which I’m assuming referred to Ireland. That was the only reference to his society, or Ireland, in this poem. He would go on to write other poems, like “Easter in 1916” which depicted Ireland’s historical uprising in 1916. He later became Senator of the free state of Ireland and also won a Nobel Prize in Literature. These two achievements were attained late in his life and reflected his success in reaching a high societal status through his works. And the poem “Words,” like all his other poems, was a rung in society’s ladder that helped him achieve such heights.

REFERENCES

Archibald, D. (1983). Yeats. Syracuse University Press.

Barsky, R. (2016, March 31). William Butler Yeats and the meaning of poetry in the modern world - 3.31.16. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aujcOweqHY

Bradford, C. (1962). Yeats and Maud Gonne. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 3(4), 452-474. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40753563

Brown, T. (1999). The life of W.B. Yeats. Blackwell. https://archive.org/details/lifeofwbyeatscri00brow_0/page/116/mode/2up

Duane, O.B. (1997). W.B. Yeats: Romantic Visionary. Brockhampton Press. https://archive.org/details/yeats00will/page/6/mode/2up

Finneran, R.J. (Ed.). (2002). The Yeats Reader. Revised Edition. Scribner.

Harper, M.M. (2007). ‘How else could the God have come to us?’: Yeatsian masks, modernity, and the sacred. Nordic Irish Studies, 6, 57-72. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30001564

Hynes, S. (1977). All the wild witches: The women in Yeats’s poems. The Sewanee Review, 85(4), 565-582. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27543298

Morrall, J. (1956). Personal themes in the public and private writings of W.B. Yeats. University Review, 1(9), 28-36. https://jstor.org/stable/25504396

W.B. Yeats (n.d.). Poets.org website. https://poets.org/poet/w-b-yeats