Style
Perhaps the most significant theme of this collection in retrospect is not really related to the content as much as the composition. These poems represent a forthright assertion of a new phase in Yeats’ poetry. The collection is a dramatic rejection of the more flowery, flighty and fanciful imagery which preceded it and is the beginning of a stripped-down approach that consciously eschews the pre-Raphaelite imagery which dominated the poet’s verse up to then. Word choice is fundamental and the piecing together into imagery becomes more authoritatively the voice of a poet rather than that of a writer tying to tap into that which has come before.
The poet and the Poet
No less than insightful mind than T. S. Eliot assigned a central thematic element unifying the poetry in this collection. His overview of In the Seven Woods asserts that it is with this volume that Yeats—by speaking “as a particular man” finally begins “to speak for man.” That last “man” should probably be capitalized because he means that through the process of fine-tuning his style, Yeats was able to focus on content that was far more personal to him and, perhaps paradoxically, by writing more personal poetry, he moved much closer to penetrating into the universality of experience which he had been struggling to do in the poems he’d written prior to the publication of this collection.
Loyalty in Conflict Equals Tragedy
This is not merely a collection of poems. In fact, the greater weight of the volume is given over to a prose play titled On Baile’s Strand. This is a poem that pits a king of kings into conflict with a lesser king and that lesser king into conflict with his own personal history. The play winds up as a tragedy, but the thematic essence of the play is the conflicted senses of loyalty exhibited by not just the kings, but a Fool and a blind man who—as is usually the case in literature—is invested with a greater vision than those equipped with working eyes. The conflicts of loyalty serve the inexorable march toward tragedy.
