Yeats' Love of Ireland

The poem starts off with Yeats imagining the traditional “freckled” Irish peasant who wears “Connemara clothes”, and goes “at dawn to cast his flies”. This constant discord between what Yeats was and what he wanted, in some purist way, to be would have caused intense internal conflict. The first stanza describes how the swan brutally raped Leda, with “a sudden blow”. This dispute Yeats had over when the time to write finished and when the time to act began, is a theme that recurs in much of his poetry, including Lapis Lazuli. The second stanza goes further as to emphasise the helplessness of the Irish, unable to “push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs”.

In “To a Child Dancing in the Wind” Yeats uses more of this rural imagery, trying to emulate the life of an Irish peasant, and thus give his life some degree of clarity. With a political poem, the more shock, the more emphatic the impact. In this poem it represents the problems that his daughter will face in her life to come. The internal conflict is then displayed as he realises that the simple man, whom he wants to be “one of my kind” is not the audience for which he writes. The only real political ideal, that he ever seems to have committed to, was hatred of the English. Yeats then pictures this “freckled man” as one from the audience for which he writes. Ireland is described as a “staggering girl”, making us think of purity and innocence; the converse is the evil nature of the swan, of England. According to the myth, Zeus, appearing in “the feathered glory” of a swan, raped the King of Spain’s wife, the “staggering girl” Leda. This fear of committing to a single cause always dogged Yeats and his ideals.