by Damyanti Ghosh

Created on: February 19, 2008   Last Updated: March 04, 2010

Some time back, I attended a wedding ceremony where the groom read W.B.Yeat's well-known poem "When You Are Old" to the bride, and these lines stayed with me: "How many loved your moments of glad grace, /And loved your beauty with love false or true;/ But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, /And loved the sorrows of your changing face." I have been reading more of Yeats since, more of his poems, his plays and his life, and it is now clear to me that this man who won the Nobel prize for literature way back in 1923 is still relevant today.

Not only is he relevant, he has insightful reactions to the human existence, and is able to put them in small capsules like " Though leaves are many, the root is one;/Through all the lying days of my youth/I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;/Now I may wither into the truth".(The Coming of Wisdom with Time, Responsibilities and Other Poems, 1916).

Yeats can get away with absolutely cliched poetical language, like "loveliness," and still create lines of matchless significance about a woman's beauty: "How many centuries spent/The sedentary soul/In toils of measurement/Beyond eagle or mole,/Beyond hearing or seeing," or "Archimedes' guess,/To raise into being/That loveliness?" (Opening song from the play Fighting the Waves). Of language he was a past master.

The themes and subjects of Yeats' poetry could be varied, because he was a man of varied interests and pursuits. Yeats could combine simplicity, a concise style, and innate wisdom for commentary on war from a soldier's point of view: "I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above;/ Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love;" (An Irish Airman Forsees His Death, The Wild Swans at Coole. 1919).

He could make a commentary on the Easter Rising in Ireland, like he did with his poem Easter(1916): "Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart./O when may it suffice?/ That is Heaven's part, our part /To murmur name upon name,/As a mother names her child /When sleep at last has come /On limbs that had run wild". Or, he could write with a deep sense of almost Wordsworthian longing for the peace and beatitude of nature: "I will arise and go now, for always night and day/I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;/ While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,/ I hear it in the deep heart's core".(The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Rose, 1893).

In his final years, Yeats was also known to give expression of his

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