Sunday, March 17, 2019
Comparing Mood and Atmosphere of The Pity of Love, Broken Dreams, and T
Mood and Atmosphere of The Pity of Love, lowly Dreams, and The Fisherman   The Pity of Love is a short, relatively simple poem, still it still manages to create a feeling of anxiousness, of desperate worry. Yeats achieves this in altogether eight lines of average length by extremely cargonful and critical use of language and structure. The poem begins with the line A pity beyond all telling, immediately setting the general modulate and primary point of the piece, elevating his despair to its highest levels and plunging the poem into the depths of depression and failure before it has b arely begun, Yeats is already admitting defeat, after a fashion, claiming that this pity is so terrible he is unable to properly describe it.   The folk who are buying and qualifying, The clouds on their journey above, The cold wet winds ever blowing, And the shadowy hazel woodlet Where mouse-grey waters are flowing,   These pastoral images are all part of an habitual rural life, something for which Yeats always strived. However, unlike his usual praising of these elements of life, this time he presents them in a distinctly downbeat way, emphasising the negative aspects, and becoming darker and darker in tone with every successive example - the wind is cold and wet the clouds are assumed to be storm clouds from the juxtaposition of the description of the wind lawful after the description of the clouds the hazel grove is shadowy and the water is mouse-grey. These are all very washed-out, colourless, cold adjectives that refect the depressed nature of the narrator. The image of fairly frantic movement conveyed by the use of the words buying and selling, journey above, ever blowing and ?owing represent the inner ... ...anza helps to gift to the unplanned feeling, and the constantly shifting focus gives an almost stream-of-consciousness feel to the proceedings. As indicated by the title, this is a sombre poem, due to its subject matter, but it is non a aci dulent poem in fact, in places, it is very romantic, especially the third stanza   The certainty that I shall see that lady Leaning or standing or walking In the first loveliness of womanhood, And with the attack of my youthful eyes, Has set me muttering like a fool.   It is as if Yeats has finally accepted Gonnes rejection and is no longer tormented by it. He is very much more at peace writing Broken Dreams than with his other Maud Gonne poems. Whilst he still finds his life understandably sad, he no longer expects her to change her mind and, accordingly, he does not write a depressingly bitter poem.
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