William Butler Yeats

Michael Robartes and The Dancer

Michael Robartes and the Dancer is a remarkable book of poems by the Irish poet and Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats. It includes the poems: Michael Robartes and the Dancer, Solomon and the Witch, An Image From A Past Life, Under Saturn, Easter, 1916, The Second Coming, A Prayer for My Daughter, and several other poems.

The Second Coming is one of the best poems by Yeats. The first stanza is one of the triumphs of poetry. He will not tolerate violence. The thought is sharp and clear in the following lines:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

This poem has become the classic. The above lines fully reveal the brutality and barbarism nowadays confirmed by September 11 catastrophe and senseless terrorist attacks. Never again did a poet of the West have so intense expression of truth. The essence of Yeats’ mood is in the above last two lines. “This is probably Yeats’s most powerful poem” (A. N. Jeffares).

The Nobel Laureate T.S. Eliot in his Yeats Lecture, delivered to the Friends of the Irish Academy at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, aptly remarked:“Yeats was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them. This is a very high position to assign to him: but I believe that it is one which is secure”.