Yeats' Lines Written in Dejection
An Analysis of the Irish Poet's Lyric from The Wilde Swans at Coole
Jul 24, 2008
Yeats is one of the most eminent and intriguing poets of the 20th century. He is at once accessible and occult; local and global; personal and mythic. "Lines Written in Dejection" from his 1919 volume The Wild Swans at Coole encapsulates many levels of meaning.
Structure
"Lines Written in Dejection" is presented in eleven lines of varying lengths in a single stanza. The first seven lines are a lament of things lost, while the last four express a frustration at the unimpressive present. The lament is further subdivided into three topics: the “dark leopards of the moon”, the “wild witches” and the “holy centaurs of the hills.”
Though at first metrically wild, a stressed-unstressed pattern dominates the last few lines. There is a single rhyme in the poem. It comes late (line 9) and fills out the most expressive and strange line in the poem: “banished heroic mother moon and vanished.”
Despite its irregular rhyme and meter, the poem is very lyrical. It mostly achieves this through repetition of structural words. Note the uses of “of” and “the” in “the round green eyes and the long wavering bodies/ of the dark leopards of the moon.”
Meaning
"Lines Written in Dejection" is about the dissipation of the feeling of imagination and magic. Yeats begins by modeling this dissipation in the creeping regularity of his meter. The first three lines describing the dark leopards of the moon never fall into regularity.
Rather, they have stretches of stressed and unstressed syllables which seem to waver like those ‘pards long bodies. In the description of the wild witches, however, the only hiccup in meter is in the term “wild witches”, containing two stressed syllables in a row. By the description of the centaurs, the poem has fallen into a banal regularity.
The final four lines contain two further metrical aberrations: “the embittered sun” and “banished heroic mother moon.” These departures from the established scheme highlight the poles of the final four lines: sun and moon. The end of the poem is dry, solar, logical. Using sun and moon as symbols is the only twinkling remainder of the intuition & magic that passed with the first section.
More significant than the metrical aberrations within the last four lines though are the order and nature of those lines. The second is very different from the rest, and from the section that preceded it as well. For the first time in the poem there isn’t a clear indication of the subject of the two verbs, and for the first time there’s a rhyme.
This beautiful line, a last stand for the lunar mysticism of the first section, is engulfed on one side by “the embittered sun” and on the other by “the timid sun.” Here Yeats shows the reader the horror of the extinguishing light of the moon first hand by using the framework he established earlier in the poem.
Conclusion
"Lines Written in Dejection" can be enjoyed on a number of levels. The words are pleasing to hear, and the images pleasing to envision. There is something secretive and dangerous hidden in there too, and the sense of it churning gives the reader a thrill. Regardless of why it is read, this is a fantastic poem, and is one to be remembered.
