| Description |
Women in the lyrics of William Butler Yeats are malleable beings who are molded into various shapes by the poet. Beautiful woman are compared to the goddess Aphrodite and Helen of Troy, and emblemize Ireland as Hibernian mythical heroines, such as Cathleen ni Houlihan. Why are these women given these and other shapes? What is Yeats doing by objectifying females as concrete symbols and mythical images? We will explore these questions by tracking Yeats's objectification of two muses- Maude Gonne and his daughter Anne -- from his early to middle works, and how his images of them change. In doing so, we will see how the incarnations of women not only reflect his life experiences with them, but also the parallel changes in his aesthetic and political aims in poetry. Just as his image of women evolves from a "tightened bow" to a "hidden" laurel tree, his poetry follows the same course. |
