The Ballads And Songs Of W B Yeats

Author : Shannon O'Byrne
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (143 download)

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Download or read book W.B. Yeats's Use of the Ballad Form written by Shannon O'Byrne and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this thesis is to show that the subject and style of Yeats's ballads undergo fundamental changes all of which use the intensity of the traditional ballad form. As Yeats writes: "we artists . . . are the servants not of any cause but of mere naked life, and above all of that life in its nobler forms, where joy and sorrow are one, Artificers of the Great Moment" (El, 260). In Yeats's earliest ballads, discussed in Chapter One, he draws upon the elemental emotional appeal of the folk ballad through the conventions of its traditional use. Ballads written in this period, such as "Down by the Salley Gardens," "The Stolen Child," and "The Ballad of Moll Magee," are simple, concise, intellectually unassuming, and generally consistent with the traditional ballad form. Yeats's later experimentation with the ballad takes a dramatically new tack, described in Chapter Two as being directed by the philosophy of A Vision. Yeats breaks sharply with ballad convention, no longer focusing on the narration of a centralized event but on the poetic revelation of mystical ideas. The simple ballad-like theme of "The Three Bushes," for example, is transformed into a poem of philosophical challenge by the series of esoteric poems which follow it. Similarly, a profound complexity of thought and expression characterize the "Crazy Jane" poems which resemble the traditional ballad only in certain structural qualities. Yeats's last ballad-like poems, discussed in Chapter Three, are of four main types. First, ballads like "Long-legged Fly" continue Yeats's objective of revealing the powerful ideas of A Visi-on, though in a manner more accessible than that of the "Crazy Jane" series. Second, thematically hybrid poems like "Three Marching Songs" unite philosophical themes to political ones. Third, Yeats composes ballads in which Irish politics alone constitute his subject as in "Come Gather round Me Parnellites." And finally, ballads like "Colonel Martin" show Yeats capturing an emotional intensity different from that of his earliest ballads though within the same traditional context. Regardless of their focus, however, Yeats's last ballads reflect his increasing commitment to write for a larger audience than the narrative and thematic complexity of the "Crazy Jane" series would admit; in his last works, Yeats uses the ballad as a means through which to speak to the "indomitable Irishry" (VP, 640).