Yeats's Themes and Motifs: Theme Subject-Matter

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Yeats's Themes and Motifs

3.1 HOW THEMES ARE EMBODIED IN A POEM
The theme of a poem is its dominant idea, its subject-matter

perceived as a concept. The subject-matter of 'The Wild Swans
at Coole', for example, may be a landscape and the creatures,
including the swans, which inhabit it, and the poet's feelings
about it. But the theme could be said to be the idea of change
and mutability. Very often we speak loosely of a theme when a
more appropriate word would be motif, a recurrent image or
idea. In the following, I have organised Yeats's themes around
a variety of key concepts and images, 'motifs' in this sense.
Analysing a poet's themes is complicated by the fact that such
themes are usually not presented directly, but are present
implicitly in a poem. They are, that is, embodied in the poem, and
have to be read out or deduced by us, from a particular
description of events or place, the evocation of a mood or
feeling, an image or cluster of images. What the poet declares
to be the theme of the poem, by fixing a particular title to it,
may mislead us, and then part of the meaning of the poem is
this very discrepancy between its declared and its actual theme.
The latter is sometimes called a subtext.
A poem is likely to have more than one theme, particularly
when, like 'The Tower' or 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen', it
is a long poem with several sections and many shifts of mood
and reference. Sometimes these themes jostle each other for
attention, creating a kind of dramatic tension between the
different impulses a poem contains. This dramatic interplay of
themes is particularly important in Yeats's poetry. We may, as
in 'The Tower', begin by feeling that the theme is anger at age
and decline, and then find that the poet is talking about lost
and unrequited love. But before we have assimilated this we
see that he is affirming the pride of the Anglo-Irish tradition,
and linking this to his own poetic achievements. A poem of any
55
S. Smith, W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction
© Stan Smith 1990
56 W. B. Yeats: A Critical Introduction
complexity will articulate several, often interlocking themes.

Much of the lyric poet's skill in embodying his themes lies in
the creation of what Yeats in 'The Circus Animals' Desertion'
called 'masterful images'. The image, or symbol, is not something
that can easily be made to give a clear and unequivocal meaning.
When Yeats, for example, uses the image of the moon in his
poems, it does not always mean ('stand for') the same thing.
Sometimes it is literally just the moon, the source of a certain
kind of light. But because its light is less revealing than the
sun's, it can be associated with the mysterious workings of the
poetic imagination, which is opposed in 'The Tower' to 'the
prosaic light of day'.
In the poem which sets forth his doctrine of history, 'The
Phases of the Moon', each of the twenty-eight nights of the
waxing and waning moon are associated, somewhat arbitrarily,
with certain types of personality and periods of history. At other
times, more generally, it simply matters whether the moon is
waxing or waning in a poem to indicate whether it is concerned
with themes of aspiration or decline. The moon, like many of
Yeats's images, is such a traditional symbol that it carries many
accumulated associations with it, and these will call up many
different themes. Poets have traditionally linked it, for example,
with the kind of aloof, disdainful and mysterious beauty in
women which Yeats finds in Maud Gonne. At the same time,
its ancient associations with madness ('lunacy') can either
reinforce or work against such an association. In 'The Tower'
'the brightness of the moon' is associated with wits driven astray
by 'a peasant girl commended by a song'. But neither of these
associations can explain a line like 'Banished heroic mother
moon and vanished' in 'Lines Written in Dejection'.
In his essay 'The Symbolism of Poetry' Yeats discusses a
passage from Bums's poetry in which the moon takes on just
such a mysterious and unanalysable polyvalency - that is, it
means many different things at the same time. Any one image,
he suggests, if it is at all powerful, will probably have many
associations, supplied by general culture or by the overall context
of the poet's work.
In Yeats's poetry symbol and image are not only devices he
uses to present his themes, but they are also themes in them-
selves. This will be discussed in the section on 'Symbol' below.

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Yeats's Themes and Motifs

The theme of a poem is its dominant idea, its subject-matter

complexity will articulate several, often interlocking themes.

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