W.B. Yeats and His Times Trivia Quiz

Answer: Maud Gonne

Yeats was deeply involved in the question of Irish independence from Britain. Gonne was a fanatical Irish revolutionary and was one of the original founders of Sinn Fein. She was also quite beautiful and a talented actress of her day. It appears that Yeats' love was never fully requited. In "No Second Troy", Yeats indicates "that she filled my days with misery" and he questioned whether, given her "high and solitary and most stern" way, she could be any different than what she was: "Why was there another Troy for her to burn?"

She must have been an extraordinary woman to be compared to Helen of Troy.

Answer: Easter, 1916

The Easter Uprising occurred on April 24, 1916 with an attack on the Dublin General Post Office and other strategic points by Irish nationalists. It was crushed by April 29 and led to the summary execution by British forces of 15 leaders. Among those executed were Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, James Connolly and John MacBride, all of whom Yeats knew.

Although supportive of Irish independence, Yeats was ambivalent about the violence used (he was a member of the Anglo-Irish elite, after all), believing that the long struggle had turned "hearts with one purpose" into a "stone to trouble the living stream." The martyrdom of his friends had, however, turned most of Ireland against the British; thus "a terrible beauty [was] born."

Answer: Meru

Yeats often wrote of the fragility of civilization. He also believed that history was cyclical. The poem's second and last stanza follows:
"Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest
Caverned in the night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day brings round the night, that before dawn
His glory and monuments are gone."

With the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the world must have appeared like night just "before dawn."

Answer: The Second Coming

A "gyre" for Yeats was a 2000 year historical cycle begun by divine birth (Leda and Zeus and Mary, the mother of Christ). The "blood-dimmed tide" was the Russian Revolution of October 1917, per Norton's Anthology. The violence of this revolution came near the end of the carnage of the First World War. Surely to most it must have looked like "things [were] fall[ing] apart" and "the center [would] not hold."

All this leads to the second and last stanza, which describes the "second coming" of the "rough beast, its hour come round at last," as it "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born." Some have interpreted the "rough beast" as the anti-Christ, ushering in some horrible historical event, of which there seemed no shortage of in the first half of the twentieth century.

Answer: Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

Some of those "ingenious things gone" were "Phidias' famous ivories" of classical Athens and "all the golden grasshoppers and bees" of Egypt's pharaohs. But Yeats understood that even his generation had its "pretty toys" which were also doomed for the ash heap of history. That one day,

"A law indifferent to blame or praise, bribe or threat,
Habits that made old wrong melt down as were wax in sun's rays,
Public opinion ripening for so long we thought it would outlive all future days,"

would be gone, too.

Answer: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Lady Augusta Gregory of County Galway, Ireland was an influential playwright, folklorist and a great friend of W.B. Yeats who collaborated with him on many projects. The death of her son Major Robert Gregory, an accomplished athlete, artist and ace fighter pilot, during the First World War had a profound effect upon Yeats. His panegyric ends:

"Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death."

Answer: September 1913

In "September 1913" the poet makes the comparison of those people with narrow self interest (commercial and clerical) who "fumble in a greasy till/ And add half pence to the pence/ prayer to shivering prayer" against the high mindedness of the Irish nationalist John O'Leary, as well as the martyrdom of Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmett and Wolf Tone. For Yeats, at that point in his belief in the cause, "Romantic Ireland [was] dead and gone."

Answer: On being asked for a War Poem

This simple six line poem seems to say that a poet should not or cannot go where he feels unqualified or inadequate and that more traditional subjects (youth and old age) should be a part of his art.

He made a similar point in the 1938 poem "Politics":
"How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!"

For Yeats, the love for a woman was poetically more interesting than war and politics, and a more proper subject.

Answer: Lapis Lazuli

In 1932, the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin had written a speech, "Fear for the Future", in which he predicted "the bomber always gets through," i.e., the strategic bomber airplane. It was in this context that Yeats contemplated towns being flattened.

But he insisted or argued that civilization must maintain its "gaiety", especially in the form of its art, in the face of tragedy. In the last stanza, in describing a gifted carved piece of Lapis Lazuli (an azure-colored precious stone), the poet imagined a Chinese man playing an instrument for his companions while sitting on a mountain, viewing all "the tragic scene" while "their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,/Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay."

Answer: The Long-Legged Fly

It is difficult to believe, in the few years before 1939, that Yeats did not have his poetic eye on events across the English Channel on the continent. Caesar needed the "silence" of the "long-legged fly upon the stream" as he pored over his maps "so that civilization may not sink."

A young Helen of Troy needed the "silence" of the "long-legged fly upon the stream" as she practiced the alluring arts of becoming a woman so that the "topless towers" of Troy may be burnt, giving birth to Homer and Western Civilization.

And, finally, Michelangelo needed the "silence" of the "long-legged fly upon the stream" so that children ("girls of puberty") may witness the art of the Sistine Chapel.

Much must have seemed in jeopardy in those years.