W B Yeats Practice Questions

Correct answer: Easter, 1916

Written to commemorate the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule, 'Easter, 1916' explores Yeats's complex, ambivalent feelings about radical nationalism. The poem contrasts the ordinary, everyday lives of the rebels before the uprising with their sudden transformation into tragic, mythic heroes through martyrdom. The paradox of a 'terrible beauty' captures the destructive yet awe-inspiring power of absolute political sacrifice.

Correct answer: A theory of history and personality from 28 lunar phases and cones called gyres.

'A Vision' represents Yeats's ultimate effort to build a unified philosophical and psychological system. The book uses geometric symbols like the 'gyre'—a spiraling cone representing historical cycles—and the twenty-eight phases of the moon to map out human personality types and historical patterns. This private mythology provided the essential structural framework for his great later poems, including 'The Second Coming' and 'Sailing to Byzantium'.

Correct answer: That it is no country for old men.

The opening line, 'That is no country for old men,' introduces the poem's central conflict between the transient world of biological youth and the permanent world of art. The speaker flees a natural world consumed by passion and decay, characterized by 'caught in that sensual music.' He journeys to the symbolic city of Byzantium to seek spiritual and artistic immortality among monuments of unaging intellect.

Correct answer: Maud Gonne MacBride

Maud Gonne was a charismatic, radical republican activist who repeatedly rejected Yeats's marriage proposals over several decades. Her fierce beauty and revolutionary politics deeply shaped his poetic output, driving him to cast her alternatively as a destructive Helen of Troy or a mythic Irish queen. Her presence remains one of the most significant creative influences in modern romantic poetry.

Correct answer: A vast shape with a lion body and the head of a man.

Written in 1919 amidst the chaos of the Russian Revolution, the aftermath of the First World War, and the Irish War of Independence, 'The Second Coming' envisions the end of a two-thousand-year historical cycle. The shape with a lion body and human head—resembling a Sphinx—symbolizes a cold, pitiless new era of authoritarian brutality replacing Christian civilization. The poem's apocalyptic imagery has become a universal metaphor for social and political collapse.

Correct answer: Thoor Ballylee

Yeats purchased the ruined 16th-century fortified tower for a nominal sum in 1916 and renamed it Thoor Ballylee. It became a permanent emblem of tradition, artistic isolation, and intellectual labor, giving titles to two of his most important volumes, 'The Tower' (1928) and 'The Winding Stair' (1933). The physical stairs inside the tower directly inspired his poetic meditations on history and spiritual ascent.

Correct answer: A small cabin made of clay and wattles.

Written while Yeats was living in the urban environment of London, 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' expresses a deep, pastoral longing for the peace and natural simplicity of County Sligo. The speaker's desire to live alone in a cabin of 'clay and wattles,' cultivate 'nine bean-rows,' and tend a hive for the honey-bee reflects a romantic quest for self-sufficiency. The poem represents the melodic rhythm and escapist focus of Yeats's early career.

Correct answer: Zeus, as a swan, assaults the mortal Leda, siring the line that led to the Trojan War.

'Leda and the Swan' combines historical determinism with brutal physical imagery to explore the intersection of the divine and the human. According to Yeats's system in 'A Vision', this supernatural encounter initiated the classical era, just as a divine announcement brought about the Christian era two thousand years later. The sonnet questions whether the mortal victim gained divine knowledge along with the god's destructive power.

Correct answer: Meditations in Time of Civil War

Written at Thoor Ballylee while republican and Free State forces clashed nearby, 'Meditations in Time of Civil War' explores the poet's sense of artistic detachment and historical despair. Through images of his stone tower, a starling's nest, and passing soldiers, Yeats examines how abstract political fanaticism degrades human culture. The poem acts as a moving critique of the violence that accompanied the birth of the modern Irish state.

Correct answer: A bittersweet look back at his old themes, symbols, and plays as he seeks new inspiration.

Composed near the very end of his life, 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' serves as a metapoetic examination of Yeats's entire creative career. He refers to his famous allegories, plays, and images—such as Cathleen ni Houlihan and Oisin—as 'circus animals' that have left him in his old age. The poem concludes with the famous realization that all art must ultimately begin in the raw realities of human emotion, or 'the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart'.

Correct answer: Irish poets, learn your trade, / Sing whatever is well made.

'Under Ben Bulben' serves as Yeats's final artistic mandate, written shortly before his death in 1939. He instructs future Irish writers to reject modern, uninspired realism and instead anchor their work in traditional craftsmanship, history, and heroic peasant life. The poem concludes with his chosen epitaph, which is carved on his gravestone in Drumcliff churchyard: 'Cast a cold eye / On life, on death. / Horseman, pass by!'

Correct answer: September 1913

'September 1913' contrasts the self-interested, religious materialism of early 20th-century merchants with the idealistic sacrifices of past Irish rebels and the Fenian leader John O'Leary. Yeats laments that contemporary society seems obsessed with counting money rather than pursuing grand, heroic national ideals. This critical view was later modified when the events of the 1916 Rising proved that romantic nationalism was still alive.

Correct answer: How can we know the dancer from the dance?

'Among School Children' begins with the poet as a sixty-year-old public official inspecting a modern convent school, which triggers a meditation on aging, his lost youth, and Maud Gonne. The final stanza uses images of a blossoming chestnut tree and a moving dancer to celebrate moments where body and soul, worker and creation, become completely unified. The closing line, 'How can we know the dancer from the dance?', serves as a major symbolist statement on artistic wholeness.

Correct answer: Major Robert Gregory, the son of his close friend and collaborator Lady Gregory.

The poem serves as a monologue for Major Robert Gregory, an exceptionally talented artist and pilot who was shot down over Italy in January 1918 while serving in the Royal Flying Corps (the forerunner of the RAF, which was not formed until later that year). Yeats avoids standard patriotic rhetoric, showing instead an airman driven by an existential 'lonely impulse of delight' rather than political duty or hatred of the enemy. It stands as an iconic modernist statement on personal choice and mortality.

Correct answer: The swans stay unwearied and passionate, while nineteen years have worn down the speaker.

The poem relies on a stark contrast between the timeless, unchanging beauty of nature and the speaker's personal experience of aging and loss. Returning to Lady Gregory's lake after nineteen years, he notes that the swans' hearts 'have not grown old' as they fly through the air in pairs. The swans act as a painful reminder of the permanent vitality and love that have begun to slip away from the poet.

Correct answer: The Nobel Prize in Literature

Yeats was the first Irish author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award the committee stated was for his highly inspired poetry, which expresses the spirit of a whole nation. Yeats chose to view the award not just as a personal triumph, but as international recognition of Ireland's cultural independence and literary vitality. The honor cemented his standing as the dominant figure of the Irish Literary Revival.

Correct answer: The Land of Heart's Desire

'The Land of Heart's Desire' is an early, lyrical verse play that captures the essence of Yeats's early fascination with folklore and the supernatural world. The plot follows Mary Bruin, who finds herself torn between her conventional duties and the freedom offered by the fairy world. The play serves as a clear allegory for the artist's desire to escape modern realities for an imaginative realm.

Correct answer: Japanese Noh Theatre

Introduced to the style by Ezra Pound, Yeats found in Japanese Noh theater the perfect antidote to Western naturalistic drama. 'At the Hawk's Well' uses masks, symbolic dance, a minimalist stage setting, and a stylized chorus to create an austere, mythic atmosphere. This experimental approach allowed him to dramatize complex themes from the Cuchulain myth cycle for a small, specialized audience.

Correct answer: That spiritual and physical love are inseparable, and that 'fair and foul are near of kin.'

Through the voice of Crazy Jane—a blunt, insightful character based on an old woman from Sligo—Yeats challenges conventional religious hypocrisy and puritanism. When the Bishop tells her to live in a celestial mansion rather than a bodily tent, Jane responds that true spiritual wholeness requires accepting both the physical and the spiritual. Her assertion that 'Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement' emphasizes that creation requires confronting both the high and low elements of life.

Correct answer: The Ten Principal Upanishads

Yeats's late-career collaboration with Shri Purohit Swami on 'The Ten Principal Upanishads' brought his lifelong engagement with Indian mysticism to a clear conclusion. He wanted to provide a translation in clear, modern English prose that avoided the dense, academic language used by Victorian scholars. This work reinforced his philosophical convictions about the cyclical nature of existence and the deep unity of the human soul.