1. Module B – Critical Study of Texts
The Poetry of W.B. Yeats
Module B – Critical Study of Texts

2. Module B – Critical Study of Texts
The Rubric

3. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to engage with and develop an informed personal understanding of their prescribed text. Through critical analysis and evaluation of its language, content and construction, students will develop an appreciation of the textual integrity of their prescribed text. They refine their own understanding and interpretations of the prescribed text and critically consider these in the light of the perspectives of others. Students explore how context influences their own and others’ responses to the text and how the text has been received and valued. (Refer to the English Stage 6 Syllabus, p 48.)

4. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to engage with and develop an informed personal understanding of their prescribed text. Through critical analysis and evaluation of its language, content and construction, students will develop an appreciation of the textual integrity of their prescribed text. They refine their own understanding and interpretations of the prescribed text and critically consider these in the light of the perspectives of others. Students explore how context influences their own and others’ responses to the text and how the text has been received and valued. (Refer to the English Stage 6 Syllabus, p 48.)

5. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to engage with and develop an informed personal understanding of their prescribed text. Through critical analysis and evaluation of its language, content and construction, students will develop an appreciation of the textual integrity of their prescribed text. They refine their own understanding and interpretations of the prescribed text and critically consider these in the light of the perspectives of others. Students explore how context influences their own and others’ responses to the text and how the text has been received and valued. (Refer to the English Stage 6 Syllabus, p 48.)

6. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to engage with and develop an informed personal understanding of their prescribed text. Through critical analysis and evaluation of its language, content and construction, students will develop an appreciation of the textual integrity of their prescribed text. They refine their own understanding and interpretations of the prescribed text and critically consider these in the light of the perspectives of others. Students explore how context influences their own and others’ responses to the text and how the text has been received and valued. (Refer to the English Stage 6 Syllabus, p 48.)

7. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to explore and evaluate a specific text and its reception in a range of contexts. It develops students’ understanding of questions of textual integrity. Each elective in this module requires close study of a single text to be chosen from a list of prescribed texts. Students explore the ideas expressed in the text through analysing its construction, content and language. They examine how particular features of the text contribute to textual integrity. They research others’ perspectives of the text and test these against their own understanding and interpretations of the text. Students discuss and evaluate the ways in which the set work has been read, received and valued in historical and other contexts. They extrapolate from this study of a particular text to explore questions of textual integrity and significance. Students develop a range of imaginative, interpretive and analytical compositions that relate to the study of their specific text. These compositions may be realised in a variety of forms and media.

8. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to explore and evaluate a specific text and its reception in a range of contexts. It develops students’ understanding of questions of textual integrity. Each elective in this module requires close study of a single text to be chosen from a list of prescribed texts. Students explore the ideas expressed in the text through analysing its construction, content and language. They examine how particular features of the text contribute to textual integrity. They research others’ perspectives of the text and test these against their own understanding and interpretations of the text. Students discuss and evaluate the ways in which the set work has been read, received and valued in historical and other contexts. They extrapolate from this study of a particular text to explore questions of textual integrity and significance. Students develop a range of imaginative, interpretive and analytical compositions that relate to the study of their specific text. These compositions may be realised in a variety of forms and media.

9. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to explore and evaluate a specific text and its reception in a range of contexts. It develops students’ understanding of questions of textual integrity. Each elective in this module requires close study of a single text to be chosen from a list of prescribed texts. Students explore the ideas expressed in the text through analysing its construction, content and language. They examine how particular features of the text contribute to textual integrity. They research others’ perspectives of the text and test these against their own understanding and interpretations of the text. Students discuss and evaluate the ways in which the set work has been read, received and valued in historical and other contexts. They extrapolate from this study of a particular text to explore questions of textual integrity and significance. Students develop a range of imaginative, interpretive and analytical compositions that relate to the study of their specific text. These compositions may be realised in a variety of forms and media.

10. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to explore and evaluate a specific text and its reception in a range of contexts. It develops students’ understanding of questions of textual integrity. Each elective in this module requires close study of a single text to be chosen from a list of prescribed texts. Students explore the ideas expressed in the text through analysing its construction, content and language. They examine how particular features of the text contribute to textual integrity. They research others’ perspectives of the text and test these against their own understanding and interpretations of the text. Students discuss and evaluate the ways in which the set work has been read, received and valued in historical and other contexts. They extrapolate from this study of a particular text to explore questions of textual integrity and significance. Students develop a range of imaginative, interpretive and analytical compositions that relate to the study of their specific text. These compositions may be realised in a variety of forms and media.

11. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to explore and evaluate a specific text and its reception in a range of contexts. It develops students’ understanding of questions of textual integrity. Each elective in this module requires close study of a single text to be chosen from a list of prescribed texts. Students explore the ideas expressed in the text through analysing its construction, content and language. They examine how particular features of the text contribute to textual integrity. They research others’ perspectives of the text and test these against their own understanding and interpretations of the text. Students discuss and evaluate the ways in which the set work has been read, received and valued in historical and other contexts. They extrapolate from this study of a particular text to explore questions of textual integrity and significance. Students develop a range of imaginative, interpretive and analytical compositions that relate to the study of their specific text. These compositions may be realised in a variety of forms and media.

12. Module B: Critical Study
This module requires students to explore and evaluate a specific text and its reception in a range of contexts. It develops students’ understanding of questions of textual integrity. Each elective in this module requires close study of a single text to be chosen from a list of prescribed texts. Students explore the ideas expressed in the text through analysing its construction, content and language. They examine how particular features of the text contribute to textual integrity. They research others’ perspectives of the text and test these against their own understanding and interpretations of the text. Students discuss and evaluate the ways in which the set work has been read, received and valued in historical and other contexts. They extrapolate from this study of a particular text to explore questions of textual integrity and significance. Students develop a range of imaginative, interpretive and analytical compositions that relate to the study of their specific text. These compositions may be realised in a variety of forms and media.

13. Introduction
The World of W.B. Yeats

14. The World of W.B. Yeats
13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939

15. The World of W.B. Yeats When You are Old published in The Rose in 1893
The Wild Swans at Coole published in Little Review in 1917
An Irish Airman Foresees his Death published in The Wild Swans at Coole in 1919
The Second Coming published in the Dial in 1920, and later included in Michael Robartes and the Dancer
Easter 1916 published in Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1921
Leda and the Swan published in the Dial in 1924
Among School Children published in The Tower in 1928

16. The World of W.B. Yeats
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, It’s with O’Leary in the grave. - September 1913

17. Map of Ireland, 1898
'I am of Ireland, And the Holy Land of Ireland, And time runs on,' cried she. 'Come out of charity, Come dance with me in Ireland.‘
- I Am of Ireland

18. The Giant’s Causeway
“Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.”
- W.B. Yeats

19. Knockachree, County Kerry, Ireland
THE old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand,
Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;
Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,
But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes
Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.
The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knock-narea,
- Red Hanrahan's Song about Ireland

20. Hart Lake and Knockachree, County Kerry, Ireland
O’Driscoll drove with a song
The wild duck and the drake
From the tall and the tufted reeds
Of the drear Hart Lake.
- The Host of the Air

21. Cliffs of Moher, Ireland
Cuchulain stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
- Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea

22. Lake of Innisfree, County Sligo, Ireland
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
- The Lake of Innisfree

23. Glenoe, County Antrim, Northern Ireland
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
- He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

24. 19 Dublin Street, Carlow, Carlow County, Ireland
“Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends.”
- W.B. Yeats

25. Faithful Place, Dublin, Ireland
“You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.”
- W.B. Yeats

26. The Four Courts, Dublin, Ireland
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
- September 1913

27. World War I I THINK it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
- On being asked for a War poem

28. World War I How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
- Politics

29. Talbot Street, Dublin, Ireland
“I think it better that in times like these a poet's mouth be silent, for in truth we have no gift to set a statesman right.”
- W.B. Yeats on War

30. Hotel Metropole and Post Office Dublin, Dublin, 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.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
- Easter 1916

31. Patrick Pearse O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take,
What should be and what not
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot?
- Sixteen Dead Men

32. Picardie, France

33. Passchendaele, France 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 blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- The Second Coming

34. Thoor Ballylee, Country Galway, Ireland
I pace upon the battlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;
And send imagination forth
Under the day's declining beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from ancient trees,
For I would ask a question of them all.
- The Tower

35. Ben Bulben, County Sligo, Ireland
Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid,
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago; a church stands near,
By the road an ancient Cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase,
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
- Under Ben Bulben

36. Maud and Iseult Gonne WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
- No Second Troy

37. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
“You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.”
William Butler Yeats ( )

38. LIFE
Born in 1865, in Dublin, Ireland, to a middle-class family belonging to the Protestant minority.
Yeats met Lady Gregory in the 1890s, who supported his project regarding the Abbey Theatre. She effectively became a long term patron and friend.
Yeats published a series of essays, The Celtic Twilight, in 1893 to promote an Irish renaissance.

39. LIFE
Married Georgie Hydes-Lees on 20 October, 1917; three weeks after his failed proposal to Iseult Gonne.
He was a member of the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928.
In December 1923 he was the first Irish author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
He died in Menton, France in 1939.

40. Yeats’s Poetry
The early period is characterised as languid and sensual in atmosphere, evoking the Romantics and the decadent artists. Yeats used Irish folklore and was influenced by the French Symbolists, and the poet William Blake.
The middle period, from the beginning of the 20th century, is characterised by a more modern and flexible style, influenced heavily by the troubles in Ireland and abroad, and Yeats began to conceive of symbols as a means to evoke universal myths. He was also influenced by his interest in the occult.
The later period was influenced significantly by his own maturity, and ageing, leading to the creation of his own vision.

41. A Vision of History Life and all of its phases
cycles spiralling upwards or downwards towards a fixed climax
the cycle reverses

42. Gyres A single gyre resembles a funnel, which begins at a fixed point.
From this point the spiral grows
wider and wider until it reaches
its maximum growth. At this climax,
the single gyre “begins to retrace
its path in the opposite direction”.

43. Gyres

44. Gyres

45. One historical revolution of the wheel takes two thousand years.
The Great Wheel
A wheel with twenty-eight spokes representing the twenty-eight phases of the lunar month.
Every civilization passes through all twenty-eight phases of the wheel.
One historical revolution of the wheel takes two thousand years.

46. The Great Wheel

47. The Great Wheel

48. Cyclical Theory of History
While one civilisation’s people are born, live, and die, they move towards their own annihilation.
From this civilisation’s death, another civilisation arises.
The point at which one era’s struggle for death coincides with the next era’s struggle for birth provokes a violent turn of the gyre.

49. in which religious, aesthetic and practical life are one
Yeats’s Symbolism
“I can not now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half-unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist.” (W.B. Yeats, Magic, 1901)
Byzantium symbolises
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
Unity of Being,
in which religious, aesthetic and practical life are one

50. The unchanging, flawless ideal
Yeat’s Symbolism
“I can not now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers, whether they are used consciously by the masters of magic, or half-unconsciously by their successors, the poet, the musician and the artist.”
(W.B. Yeats, Magic, 1901)
The swan symbolises
The unchanging, flawless ideal
The Wild Swans at Coole OR
A violent divine force
Leda and the Swan