Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The poem is a response to Easter Rebellion in which Irish nationalists rose up to fight against British rule. This particular passage situates a metaphor in which political fanaticism is symbolized as heart of stone which nevertheless possesses the power to disrupt the pageantry of all life which is going on around it. The stream is the symbol for a full life that exists outside one controlling obsessive passion.
She. I have heard said
There is great danger in the body.
He. Did God in portioning wine and bread
Give man His thought or His mere body?
She. My wretched dragon is perplexed.
This title poem of this collection is structured as a dialogue between a man and a woman. The composition clearly delineates which lines are being spoken by which character. “She” and “he” are organically integrated into the meter and rhythm of the poem, but it could easily be extract from verse form and transformed into a scene to be acted out.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The opening lines to this poem certainly rank among the most famous that Yeats ever composed if not existing at the very top of the heap. The poem itself and especially this excerpt are favorites to be called into action whenever the world seems to be experiencing a moment of crisis in which things seem to drifting out of control. The line enjoyed great success in the last half of the second decade of the 21st century. Other writers have also been equally stimulated. Chinua Achebe titled his groundbreaking novel Things Fall Apart after the poem’s imagery and the strange language of the opening line became the inspiration for one of Robert Parker’s Spenser series of detective novels.
I, the poet William Yeats,
With old mill boards and sea-green slates,
And smithy work from the Gort forge,
Restored this tower for my wife George;
And may these characters remain
When all is ruin once again.
Ballylee refers to a case build sometime between the 15th and 16th centuries originally called Thoor Ballylee Castle and which later became known as “Yeats’ Tower” because the poet briefly called it home. This is the poem in its entirety and it a love poem to a place he did indeed love well. The purpose of writing the poem is simple and direct. If one visits the castle today, they will find a stone on which is carved the verse.
