NATURE VERSUS HISTORY IN W. B. YEATS 107tree, flower, bird. Instead, like Blake (whose poems he published) and Hardy,
he makes them symbols. Crickets singing and lake water lapping at Innisfree
betoken peace, Fergus rules the sea and stars.
Nature served to offset politics, history, personal experience, especially after
the Easter Rebellion when Irish nationalists revolted in Dublin. Britain executed
the leaders, throwing Yeats into doubt over bravery and rashness, action and
decorum. “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born,” runs the
refrain in “Easter 1916.” The poem asks if historic emergency ennobles or coars-
ens men and women, if zeal and fanaticism sacrifice human fineness. Yet one
surprising stanza shifts away from politics. With brief lines turning on idiomatic
rhymes, Yeats simply depicts “the living stream” and “birds that range / From
cloud to tumbling cloud.”
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone ’s in the midst of all.Because the stone of political monomania can only momentarily “trouble the
living stream” of natural change, this one stanza needs no refrain claiming that
“A terrible beauty is born.” Hearty play between moorcocks and moorhens,
changing yet unchanged, survives the convulsion that brought forth indepen-
dent Eire.
Soon after Easter 1916, Yeats visited his friend Lady Gregory’s Coole Park estate.
The place reminds him how years before, when he was young, wild swans would
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings....
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air.The words catch a wild avian energy—“suddenly mount... scatter wheeling...
clamorous wings... paddle in the cold... climb the air”—but the swans drive
home a poet ’s loneliness: “I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, / And
now my heart is sore.” Years later, again remembering “sudden thunder of
the mounting swan,” Yeats finds “Another emblem there!”—“Nature ’s... a
mirror of my mood.”