Yeats's old age poem 'The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner' depicts the terrible realities of poet's old age. Yeats accepts the foul, the tragic, and a common as an essential part of life's reality (correspondingly) in this poem.
The poet begins with a criticism of the politicians, both living and those who died in the recent revolution. Even a note of self-criticism is also conspicuous in, the poem, for Yeats begins by saying that he had also been guilty of complacency and detachment in his attitude towards his fellow-Irishmen: now he recognizes that through the events of Easter week, his fellow countrymen have achieved an admirable heroic intensity. Heroic intensity has gone beyond the cycles of ordinary life, and achieved permanence in the midst of lives.
Because the falcon (body or desire or instinct or will power or civilization or devil) is no longer in a position to listen to intellect i.e. the falconer (soul or conscience or god or creator) its controlling forces and the soul, as it goes on turning and turning in an ever widening whirl, the center is unable to hold its own.
Sailing to Byzantium written in 1926 is an emphatic reminder of the poet's keen interest in that historic city of Eastern Empire and the significance of art and culture. In the metrical form, “Sailing to Byzantium” follows an ottava rima stanza pattern. Yeats, however, modifies the form to suit his own purpose, using ten syllables instead of the original eleven and using slant rhymes instead of exact ones.
In winter the dipping water freezes and hangs; the shepherd breathes his fingernails to warm them; Tom carries wood to the fireplace; milk is frozen in the bucket while taking it home; people feel biting cold and the roads are muddy because of rain. At night the owl stares and sings a happy song. And the cook prepares steaming soup to keep the family members warm.
My Mistress' Eyes are Nothing by William Shakespeare is an anti-metaphorical sonnet, unlike the other popular sonnets of Elizabethan times. It uses the language of irony to satire. In the first quatrain the poet states that his mistress eyes can never be compared with the sun. He finds coral more reddish than her lips.
The poem Full Fathom Five Thy Father Lies occurs in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, Act I, Scene 2. The spirit Ariel sings this song to Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, whom mistakenly thinks his father is drowned.
One early morning, in the twilight of dawn, Aengus goes into the forest, makes a fishing rod out of a stick of haze, a thread and using a berry as bait, catches a little silver trout. As he blows on the fire to cook the fish, the fish is transformed into a “glimmering girl” with apple blossom in her hair.
If the poet had the beautifully decorated cloths of heaven made with golden, silver and dark light he would spread them under his beloved’s path. But he is poor and can’t give her beautiful cloths. He can give her only his dreams. Therefore he has spread his dreams on her way. And he requests her to walk softly because his dreams may be broken easily. The poet wishes he had the cloths of heaven.
The poem Among School Children was composed after the poet’s visit to a convent school in Waterford Ireland in 1926. This poem moves from a direct consideration of the children to Yeats’ early love, Maude Gonne, and then to a passionate philosophical conclusion in which all of Yeats’s platonic thinking blends into an exalted hymn of raise to the glory and the puzzle of human existence.