Posting One

The Madness Of King Goll:
The madness of King Goll starts out with the king boasting about how, while sitting on his cushioned and comfortable chair, away from all harms, anything he said became law; this kept peace, and under his law the country was lush and plentiful with surplus. In the second stanza, this perfection was interrupted by pirates (the Vikings?). There is an interesting shift in the second stanza when he writes, “And under the blinking of the stars”. The heavens become unstable and have the mortality of humanity. This utopia is put into question. In the third stanza, the king leaves his cushy thrown and the king seems to loose his mind. He slowly kills, and all of a sudden those blinking stars are shining again, and birds flutter, water rolls, in his ecstatic state where the fire was birthed inside of his spirit. In the fourth stanza King Goll is much different from the King we were introduced to. He is no longer drinking wine away from the beasts, he is wandering the woods, trying to tame and guide them (“I lead along the woodland deer”), but at the same time he joins the beasts (“the grey wolf knows me”). Still, he cannot tame the beasts; even the rabbits do not heed him( he has no handle on the warfare). He lingers in this forest a long time, them finally reaches a town but meets no people. He sings and beats his drum alone and speaks of how, when the sun dies, and the earth is near it’s end, “orchil” cover’s this death up. Though his ‘ fire’ seems to be quenched fro a second, he still wanders on. “They will not hush, the leaves a-flutter round me, the beech leaves old.’ I’m unsure of how to interpret this. Maybe it’s speaking of the constant discontent Ireland has with itself. Turmoil will never cease to stir, reaching far back into the past and future.

The Ballad of Moll Magee:
The word choice and rhyme is simple, just like the simple, hard workingwomen this poem speaks about. The sparseness of the word choice and the shortness of the lines (especially in contrast with King Moll) understate her tragedy (she accidentally rolled over onto her baby and killed it in her sleep) just as the people around her do. There is some hope offered; she is given a bit of food, someone one reassures her that he husband will want her back, and she believes that he little dead daughter is up in heaven with God, watching over her. In the end, this tale is told as a lesson to all of us to not throw stones but pity the unfortunate.
However, I have a hard time buying Yeats' faith in God, especially after reading The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland. I think Moll’s faith in God could be interpreted as a defense that arose out of her simple mind. In a life of tragedy, this poor woman who life is nothing but work and sorrow creates a god and an afterlife to allow her to not only move on, but also scold those who fling stones at her. This God gives her dignity. Or maybe The Man Who Dreamed of Fairyland came at a time in Yeats’ life when God died. Death is everywhere in the poem and hovers above every thought. The man in the poem dreams of life after death: “the tale drove his fine angry mood away.” However, when death comes, this fairy tale of heaven is of no use to him. The earth takes him, and finally he has at last “ unhaunted sleep,” indicating there is absolutely nothing after death. The vocabulary and structure of this poem is a lot more advanced compared with Moll Magee, which indicates a seriousness of subject, while Moll Magee seems satirical.

To An Isle in the Water and The lake Isle of Innisfee both have interesting sounds. An Isle is simple, for a simple love and a girl who the author knows little about. The sh sound in shy is repeated numerous times throughout this short poem, creating the shhhhhh, which compliments the idea of the word shy and creates a feeling of softness and the sound of quiet water. She is isolated like the island, but brings light in this damp dismal word.
The Lake Isle follows a pattern of stress and then breaks it in parts where Yeats talks about sound. It’s as if the poet is musing in his head, and these thoughts are interrupted by the bees, crickets, and water. This seems to exult the tangible world of nature and reveal the abstractions of the mind.