An Overview
Reconsidering “The Listeners”, “Musee Des Beaux Art”, “The Unknown Citizen”, “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Second Coming”
Here I intend to present an overview of the poems you have already studied; namely they are: “The Listeners”, “Musee Des Beaux Art”, “The Unknown Citizen”, “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Second Coming”.
The purpose of this afterthought is to connect the poems together as belonging to the same art of poetry and simultaneously to distinguish them from one another as individual treatments of one single theme. Undoubtedly, the poets’ subjects, use of language, style and imagery are different. However, the unifying theme of all these poems is LIFE. They deal with life and its human experiences each from a different standpoint. Walter de la Mare, in “ The Listeners”, plays the visionary role through which he touches upon very sensitive subjects such as man-to-man relation and means of communication to cultivate and perpetuate such a relation. The poem also is a highly spiritual one with the poet’s awareness of this feature. He therefore introduces his spiritual philosophy in a very simple language and style guided by repetitions and rhetorical questions. That the two worlds outside and inside the cottage are made concrete and real becomes very clear and tangible by the traveller’s insistence that he has come and “ kept [his] word”. Every one of us might be the voice of that traveller for all of us are just peripheral travellers in this life.
Another of human life’s experience is introduced by W.H. Auden in his “Musee Des Beaux Art” where he transforms the meanings of mute paintings into a living argument: the argument of human suffering. Most of you must have heard stories about how lonely and helpless people suffer alone in the West. Actually not only in the West but almost everywhere people suffer alone, though with varying degrees of loneliness. The message Auden is sure to deliver to us is that (we should either live together or die lonely and sad). We have to take care of the old, the needy, the helpless, the weak and the poor in order to feel the scent of humanity and its depth.
Auden again picks up this theme of suffering in his “The Unknown Citizen” wherein the main human character is marginalized into a mere digit in a huge indifferent computer system. The sadness of the poem becomes clear when we arrive at the one single fact that instead of being encompassed and embraced by society and its social system, Western citizens are embraced and controlled by a computerized society where all are unknown or at their best are just computer digits. In that computerized reality everything becomes unreal and virtual; even human feelings like happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy etc. are marginalized and not counted for. The question , ( Is he happy?) ,at the end of the poem summarizes this human plight in the modern age.
W.B. Yeats’ view of life is rather cultural than a mere social one, like it is with Auden for instance. Yeats complains that poets are no longer respected or honored in the West. The modern age is one that is for young people and not for poets (old people). Therefore, and to put an end to this living pain, he prefers to delve deep into the worlds of the past, memories, idealism, poetic achievement and imagination. These are good healing worlds for all poets as Yeats suggests. He refers to them as the Byzantium(s) of the soul and the place for eternity. Actually that is true. The world of poetry and imagination is sure to grant poets full access into immortality. Today we read the poems poets wrote a century ago and that is a good example of immortality and living for ages and with ages.
Yeats gives full vent to his deeply-felt anger against indifferent modern societies in his “ The Second Coming”. In this poem, he spits fire like a dragon, and not mere words. The whole poem is a cautionary one wherein the reader feels scared of what is coming next. Yeats warns, swears and shouts with wrath that modern peoples are losing their minds, values, traditions, spirituality and finally God Himself. Modern life , for Yeats, becomes hollow and meaningless. What makes “ The Second Coming” a foreboding poem is its highly symbolic and visionary style with freakish animals, birds of death, lost falcons and gyres. The impending feeling that everything is just swallowed and caught by and into an eternal whirlpool is enough to create horror throughout the poem . We finish reading this poem with open mouths and eyes terrified by the destructive destiny lurking ahead of us. The poem is a prophetic one.
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