Stylistic Analysis of William Butler Yeats' s Poem When You Are Old
校园英语 / 文艺鉴赏Stylistic Analysis of William Butler
Yeats’s Poem When You Are Old
武汉大学/秦泽昊
【Abstract】As one of the foremost figures of the 20th century literature, William Butler Yeats has created lots of famous poems, including the poem When You Are Old, which expresses his love to Maud Gonne and his understanding of love. Stylistics provides us a new perspective to analyze and understand poems. This thesis just applies the theory of stylistics and analyzes the poem from phonological, lexical, syntactic/grammatical and semantic features. After analyzing it word by word and line by line, readers can feel the poet’s strong emotions more easily and profoundly.【Key words】stylistic analysis; William Butler Yeats; poem
I. Introduction
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of the twentieth century literature. He was staunch in affirming his Irish nationality and maintained his cultural roots. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honored for what the Nobel Committee described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. Fellow poet Wystan Hugh Auden assigned Yeats the high praise of having written “some of the most beautiful poetry” of modern times. Yeats is a Symbolist poet and uses allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. He chooses words and assembles them so that they suggest other abstract thoughts that may seem more significant. The poem When You Are Old was written in 1893, four years after he met Maud Gonne. He fell in love with her at the first sight and proposed to her four times in his life, but she refused each proposal, even when she was frustrated in the marriage. The poem just expresses Yeats’intense love to Maud Gonne through the elaborated design. As a branch of linguistics, stylistics studies style in a scientific and systematic way concerning the linguistic features of different varieties of language at different levels. It links literary criticism to linguistics and provides a new way to appreciate literary works. Using the theory of stylistic analysis can help us understand the poem more profoundly.
II. Stylistic Analysis
1. Phonological Features
Unlike other modernists preferring free verse, Yeats is a master of the traditional forms. The poem shares the pattern of iambic pentameter (V—V—V—V—V—). And the rhyme scheme of the poem is a (sleep) b (book) b (look) a (deep), c (grace) d (true) d (you) c (face), e (bars) f (fled) f (overhead) e (stars). In the fifth, ninth and twelfth lines, glad and grace, bending and beside, hid and his are alliteration. In the third, seventh and eighth lines, read and dream, one and loved, changing and face are assonance. In the fourth line, once and shadows is consonance. The application of alliteration, assonance and consonance make the poem sound beautiful. Also, Yeats like using words with diphthong, triphthong or long vowel to express strong emotions. For example, soul, glowing ([??]), grace, face ([e?]) and eyes, beside ([a?]) are diphthongs, ?re ([a??]) is triphong and read, dream ([i:]), bars, stars ([ɑ:]) are long vowels.
2. Lexical Features
In this poem, Yeats uses lots of words to describe the appearance and behaviors of the man and his beloved one. The poet just draws a picture to convey the artistic conception rather than gives his own comments. That is to say, the diction is descriptive rather than evaluative. Also, the poet tends to use simple words. The poem has one hundred words in total. Among them, eighty words are monosyllabic, and twenty words are polysyllabic. In this way, the poem becomes catchier. And there are thirteen verbs or verbal words in this poem. Nine of them (nodding, take, read, dream, bending, murmur, fled, paced and hid) are dynamic verbs and express activities, while four of them (all of them are loved) are static verbs and express a kind of emotion.
3. Syntactic/Grammatical Features
In this poem, Yeats tends to use simple sentences. He uses a series of verbs to describe the man’s beloved one. And adverbial modifiers are frequently used, such as the use of gerund (e.g. nodding by the ?re) and prepositional phrase (e.g. with love false and true). Also, different tenses are used in this poem. When describing the beloved one’s behavior, the poet uses present tense to make the imaginary scene more vivid and authentic. When talking about love and the love towards the beloved one, the poet uses past tense and talks about the stories. As for the voice, all of the lines are active voice. In this way, descriptions are more lifelike and acceptable, and readers are easier to imagine the scene described in the poem. What is more, sentences in the poem are not as grammatical as those in academic writings. The poet can adapt the word order, omit some sentence elements or only use some sentence fragments to express meanings. The tolerance of non-grammatical phenomena provides the chance of creating masterpieces for the poet.
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