"A Needle's Eye" William Butler Yeats All the stream that's roaring by Came out of the a needle's eye; Things unborn, things that are gone, From needle's eye still goad it on. | Akin to Robert Louis Stevenson is his wide variety and quality of work William Butler Yeat’s poetry could not help but wander helplessly into my merciless grasp yet again. Though often regarded as a grandiose or obnoxiously self-assured for the almost pompous and ceaselessly confident tone of his poetry Yeats was nonetheless a brilliant and multifaceted writer. Born into art in the year of the 1865 to the renowned Irish painter John Butler Yeats, the young Yeats grew up partially in County Sligo, province of Connacht in Ireland, where his parents were raised, partially in London. At the age of fifteen, he continued his education in Dublin where he followed his new-found love of poetry, even though he had planned to study painting in honor of his father. Despite the mixed locations of his childhood, Yeats always made it clear he was Irish, in heart and soul. This patriotism lead to his work as an active member of the Celtic Revival, a movement against the English rule’s cultural dominations that had begun in Victorian Ireland. The group consisted of many of Ireland’s Anglo-Irish landowning class and their actions sought to restore Irish public spirit and native heritage. Yeats's pride in his country was evident in his work by his inspiration sourced in Irish folklore and mythology(though he himself never learned Gaelic). Also, in his fascination and infatuation with the Irish revolutionary, zealous nationalist and aristocratically beautiful actress Maud Gonne, and though she turned him down for another man and he moved on to marry another woman(Georgie Hyde Lees) she was a powerful emotional influence in his poetry. The lust and heartache that Maud Gonne prompted in Yeats lead to some of his most powerful poems, to him she was the human embodiment of his Irish allegiance to marry her would be as close as he would come to marrying his country. If you wish to read more about the scandalous affairs of the William Butler Yeats I wrote about his shocking life in greater detail in my analysis of "When You Are Old" which is linked below. |
William Butler Yeats went through several major shifts in poetic style but he always maintained his classical patterns. From the gradual and lyrical, mythology and lore inspired pieces of his earlier days, a tribute to poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood( such as Edmund Spenser and Percy Bysshe Shelley who were such an important influence to Yeats), to the modernist influenced poems of his 1900’s phase, which relinquished the Mysticism of his earlier works for a style that was both more tangible and more honest. “A Needle’s Eye” was published in 1935 in “A Full Moon in March” one of Yeats final poetic anthologies, regarded as the less complex of three concluding poems leading up to the structure of the poem “A Vision” each of these poems shared an historical theme: the evolutions of man in “The Four Ages of Man”, then the magnitude of heavenly interference(from gods to the stars) in “Conjunctions” to the continuing stream of historical events in “A Needle’s Eye”. An unusual poem with an almost unreadable trochaic meter, despite it’s impressive philosophical themes and symbolic language, “A Needle’s Eye” betrays talent but also a lack of interest, the voice feels artificial and the emotions synthetic. Yeats’s expression feels forced as though he doesn’t truly care about the revolutions of time and space he describes, but merely thinks they sound imposing when phrased with such eloquent style. His lack of verisimilitude is also evident in the impeded flow of the piece, it just doesn’t have the proper smoothness that candid poetry should have. So though it’s theme, and language use are simply exquisite they are made obsolete by a lack of personal inflection or truthful tone or fluid transitions, and it ends up feeling beautiful but stoic.
In a slight abandonment of his signature, William Butler Yeats uses less traditional, and more modernist style. He employs a very simple AABB rhyme scheme, which for him is uncharacteristically basic, and honestly does not suit his sophisticated and aristocratic style, the elementary rhyme seems silly beside his elaborate phonetic structures, as well as all of his lines consisting of the same number of syllables( seven to be precise) save for the last line which has eight syllables. The difference in syllables between lines seems to be have been employed in order to allow Yeats to use trochaic meter(every second syllable is unstressed) as opposed to his usual classic iambic. Nonetheless, the ordinary fluency of Yeats poetry is simply not there, and the poem feels oddly forced and unnatural.
The theme of “A Needle’s Eye” is the ceaseless course of the universe, a deep and poignant topic it feels a little strange to confine it to only four lines. “All the stream that’s roaring by,” is the present flow of time and events and Yeats marks it to have “Came out of a needle’s eye”. A needle’s eye is a nearly macroscopic opening and Yeats’s deliberate use of it clearly signifies that all things must begin small, and rise from the same basic roots. “Things unborn, things that are gone” are all the happenings of past and future, and Yeats depicts them as “From the needle’s eye still goad[ing] it on.” Every event of the past spurs on the actions of the present and every hope for our future influences everything we will come to do. Yeats may be trying to insinuate that we are all, everything that is, ever was, or will be, has been born from the same “mother”(“the needle’s eye”)and we will all return to her arms in death. This poignant image is disrupted by the abrupt flow and ending of the poem, but it is meaningful despite this.
This may not be one of William Butler Yeats’s greatest or even one of his better poems, yet from it we can distinguish the coming changes that age brought to his work a blending of his love of the occult philosophies and mysticism with the more contemporary and topics of broad worldly concepts for a homogenous society. Written with the idiosyncratic concision of Yeats later works “A Needle’s Eye” brings to fabricated life the rhythms of the universe, from birth to death the connections between every man, woman, child and babe, every flower, tree, wolf and rabbit every fish in the sea, every bird in the air, ever river or lake that ever has been or will be we are all part of as “The Lion King” so iconically put it the circle of life. A brilliant and devoted writer even his lesser works are marvelously captivating. Even if you have to look a little harder to enjoy them. “A Needle’s Eye” may not be the most flattering example of William Butler Yeats’s poetry but it is brilliant and intriguing nonetheless.