Amazing for my English AS revision! So clear, so contextual and so engaging and interesting. Thank you so much! Please could you possibly do more Yeats AS level poems to further my revision?
Hello, you have a large fan base in Winchester! It would be super helpful if you were able to do this for other poems by Yeats such as 'Broken Dreams', 'The Second Coming' and 'Sailing to Byzantium'. - from an A-level student. :)
A good analysis especially of the form of the poem. However, the gentle Ms Dempster glosses over the real nitty gritty of the poem which is the airman’s feeling of the pointlessness of his life. That is the breathtaking revelation we are given at the end and it is preceded and worked up to by declarations expressing indifference to the enemy and to the country he is fighting for. Not even his affection for Kiltartan can keep him grounded to life.
On agreement with you, a poem that questions everyone..we are french and we have made it a small ,modest song for those who fan hear it. m.ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VYlZ0NlXREY.html
My students and I just discovered this poem. Excellent poem. It deserves to be carried on through the generations. Great job discussing this poem. We all enjoyed the video. Thank you for your work.
Excellent analysis of this poem, thank you for that, but now that I've watched your vid and read the poem, I must say, other than the beautiful form of the poem, I don't like it at all. The character does not seem idealized or even noble. He goes to war, risking his life, and murdering other humans beings, simply because he enjoys the job? Also, concerning the lines "the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind". You lightly brush over these grim words, focusing on the balance and parallelism in them. But what about the meaning? How can these words not mean anything but the extremely pessimistic, suicidal meaning they clearly say? My final frustration with this poem is HOW orderly it is. This man is about to die, and his final words are calm, flat, and carefully worded, with little emotion. You mentioned that the author finds "passive suffering" not worth writing poems about, yet this poem seems to be an EXACT recount of passive suffering. This poem 'balances' (to use that word once again) just between an emotional, tragic recount of a man who embraces death and a noble, brave man who accepts death for the greater good, staying instead just between those two dramatic accounts to give an account that is neither wonderfully tragic or wonderfully inspiring. If I was the mother of the man this poem was written for, I would be beyond disappointed with this poem. (This is just my opinion, by the way, not trying to offend anyone.) :)
Fate ... An important word in Yeats' spiritual vocabulary.. Yeats senses Robert's calmness as being sourced in the resignation to his destiny. Having spent some time with 'Byzantium", I'm more persuaded in my thinking about the spiritual richness in the poem and less by the romantic attributions made in the video. I felt spiritually elevated by the clarity and balance of the poems last four lines; I had strong sensation of lightness and transition into another realm. Yeats' magic in verse is to be experienced and less understood.
In the OCR English Lit exam, you are required to link the given poem to 3 others. "A public man", line 10, relates to the quote "A sixty-year-old smiling public man" in Yeat's poem, Among Schoolchildren. In Among Schoolchildren, Yeats is referring to himself - an old politician. You could talk about the fact that Yeats conveys the 'public man' in different ways in these to poems. An interesting thing to think about...
Public MEN ?? This refers to King and Country, etc. It's about patriotism, propaganda and principles. There's no negative connotation; Yeats dismisses the power of people to influence Ribert's volunteering. Yeats joined the Senate without any persuadion from others; Easter 1916 is a very good example of how Yeats considered himself to be the poet laureate of the Free State. Yeats felt it was his destiny to be famous. Standing in front of the school children, Years felt publicly self conscious and felt past his prime. However he felt it his duty to smile in public ... Even as a scarecrow.
