Thinking about the endless cycle of life, human beings have always been looking for a way to express their feelings and emotions. People broke the traditional standards or styles; and found new ways of expressing their ideas through art and poetry. The new movement was called Impressionism; and the best works of the Impressionist Age include William Butler Yeatss The Wild Swans at Coole and Derek Walcott’s The Season of Phantasmal Peace. In the both works the authors used symbolism and emotional connotations as the main tools that help a reader to concentrate on an emotional approach, examining works. In his essay “Magic”, Yeats writes, “I cannot now think symbols less than the greatest of all powers (p. 28).
For a lot of contemporary authors, such as William Butler Yeats and Derek Walcott, birds were a source of inspiration, confrontation, and revelation. The relationships between birds and human beings have always been complex, and often startling. Watching the life of birds, people compared it with their own. They often considered birds as God creatures that are simpler and useless than people are. In the both poems that were given, birds are both literal and metaphoric. Birds symbolize something eternal and quite different from human beings. We, people, with our haste to live, seem to forget about time and the beauty of life around us.
The poem The Wild Swans at Coole was written by William Butler Yeats. Kathleen Raine wrote that in the age of rising realism, political verse and University wit.. Yeats tried to be innocent and noble, revealing desires of human harts and souls. The value of his symbolic images was expressions of timeless ideals. The structure of the poem reflects more closely the constructions of common speech. It helps readers to perceive the poem as a deeply personal one. The author is watching the cycle of life through nature, his own cycle. From the very beginning of the poem he shows autumn as a decline of life, /The trees are in their autumn beauty./ The picture of a still sky and paths are dry fills the reader with a sense of maturity.
The trees lose their leaves they are ready to finish yearly cycle. The author is observing the swans in Coole Park. He told that nineteen years had been passed since he came to the place at the first time: /The nineteenth autumn has come upon me/ /Since I first made my count;/ The author began to realize that he was getting older. He compared his life with nature. He showed that his life became still and dry after those nineteen years. But suddenly the author saw swans.
They were /brilliant creatures.wheeling in great broken rings/ The swans were beautiful and full of life like Yeats youth. Thats why his /heart is sore/. The birds made a contrast to the calm flow of time. They were used as a metaphor for the poets youth. The author confessed that the youth had gone and never come back. Time will pass, but nothing will make the youth come back.
/Companionable streams or climb the air;/ /Their hearts have not grown old;/ /Passion or conquest, wanders where they will,/ /Attend upon them still./ At the end of the poem the author said that some day the youth would go away forever. /I awake some day/ /To find they have flown away?/ The poem “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” was written by the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. The poem is considered to be extraordinary because it has a lot of metaphors and symbols; and make a reader to create mental images. The very word phantasmal means something that has no physical reality. It is a sense that can be perceived and distorted by the five senses. So, Phantasmal Peace means imagine peace. This word encapsulates the image of the poem.
In the poem the author imagines a huge cloud of different birds rising soundlessly above the earth, /Then all the nations of birds lifted together/ They rose in a /”passage of phantasmal light / that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.”/ The author mentioned different kinds of birds in his work, such as geese, ospreys, starlings, ravens, killdeer, and chough. They are like people speaking different languages, like people that do not want to live in peace on the planet. From the very beginning the author mentions the sound of their calling. But afterward he refers to /”soundless voices”/. The birds raised the net of /soundless at night/; the birds’ cries soundless. For a moment it became peace. The “nations of birds,” united their “multitudinous dialects.” And the author said that the birds flew away, carrying their soundless net: /and no one hearing knew/ /what change had brought into the raven’s cawing,/ /the killdeers screech/ As it was said above, the birds are both literal and metaphoric in this poem.
The birds are like nature. People cannot understand it,/ men could not see/. Thats why Nature has to watch us soundless, watch human beings who do not want to live in peace with it. Nature through the eyes of the birds watches people and feels pity: /pity for the wingless ones/ /below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses/ Comparing with people, the imagine birds in Derek Walcotts “The Season of Phantasmal Peace” look like creatures more united and clever than we are sometimes. They cover the planet with the soundless net and protect it from different conflicts: among different people as well as between human beings and nature. They help to create a moment when a people can stand and stare. It is evident that peoples life will be poor if they have no time for it, full of care. A moment of reconciling peace takes on, in the poet’s lines, a spectral actuality: /and this season lasted one moment, like the pause/ /between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,/ /but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long./ The last lines of the verse are very important, and include the main idea of the poem.
The author pointed that though the difference between dusk and darkness is not big; but the moment will more essential for future. The author articulates on the guilty privileged of the world into ‘revenge tragedy’. The poem The Season of Phantasmal Peace completes the sequence with a redemptive closure. The final three words: “it lasted long”? mean that human beings should enlarge the moment of peace to lengthen it so that it lasts longer than before. No effort could be worthier or more essential for our common future, if we are to think of the planet.
Bibliography:
Norman, Jeffares.The Cultural Address of Derek Walcott. Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 2, No.
7 (Jul., 1951), pp. 291-293. Donald, A., Stauffer. Principles of Poetry in the Lyrics of William Butler Yeats. Journal of Poetry Therapy, Springer Netherlands,Vol. 14, Number 3 – March, 2001..