The Indian Upon God
Yeats' profound insight on religion is resonant in this poem. It is a fable-like story conveyed in poetic words. At the beginning of the poem the poetic persona is seen wandering near a body of water. While walking, he notices a moorfowl, a lotus, a roebuck and a peacock. They are introspecting on the grace of God. Interestingly he can understand their language and what they are talking about. To every creature in the poem the creator has different characteristics. They have their subjective representation of God. According to the moorfowl, God is a mighty moorfowl,
"Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak
Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky.
The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye."
The lotus visualizes God as a big lotus whose petals are gigantic in size. Then comes the roebuck and thereafter the peacock. They also see God as they are in reality but in a big frame.
In this way Yeats wants to say that we visualize God or the creator according to our spectacle. Though God takes a new shape in our vision, he has some commonalities. Indians have numerous deities to worship like the creatures in the poem. At the end the essence of God is similar to all of us but the representation of the image differs from person to person.
The Falling of the Leaves
The season of autumn has come. In this backdrop, the poet is introspecting on the transience of life. He compares the leaves of the trees to our lives. At the verge of death, he resorts to love. Love is the only quality which helps to cherish each and every moment of our life with a kiss. In this poem the trees become a part of mankind and the poet reiterates the elegy of their life during autumn.
Yeats begins the poem directly and draws the background for the readers. He writes,
"Autumn is over the long leaves that love us,
And over the mice in the barley sheaves;
Yellow the leaves of the rowan above us,
And yellow the wet wild-strawberry leaves."
In the second stanza, the poet becomes a companion of the trees and shares their grief. He guides them to, "part, ere the season of passion forget us,/With a kiss and a tear on thy drooping brow." The falling of leaves is a metaphor of death. As we cannot alter the event of death, we should accept it with a smile. Grief will be there to caress us in our deathbed, even then we shouldn't stop loving. It is the message of the poet to us.
