The Crucifixion of the Outcast - W B Yeats - 164 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

W B Yeats’ Stories of Chritian faith - The Secret Rose


"The Crucifixion of the Outcast" is a parable in which a wandering poet is led by Christian brothers to his execution. As his cross is set in the earth, he offers a portion of his last meal to the beggars who have gathered to watch. When he is nailed to the cross, however, he finds that mercy without humility is a seed that cannot grow. The story leads tot he teaching by Jesus where he says that even in mercy there has to be a submission to fellow humans.



In "The Curse of the Fires and of the Shadows," Puritan soldiers storm an abbey and attack a group of friars. Before he dies, the abbot raises the cross upon the altar, and promises divine vengeance. Immediately afterward, the soldiers are told that two messengers have escaped on horseback to warn and gather the people for a counterattack.


The Secret Rose explores themes of faith and persecution


Caption - adapted from Waterstones

John Sherman and Dhoya - William Butler Yeats - 163 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

John Sherman and Dhoya - two interconnected short stories of Yeats.

With the exception of “John Sherman,” William Butler Yeats’s short stories show Yeats’ legendary attraction to the spirit world and reflects his fascination with good and evil. Since they were written during the fin de siècle period when literary and graphic artists, epitomized by the French symbolists, were expressing a world-weariness and pessimism that celebrated the triumph of evil, it is understandable that Yeats’s tales articulate that prevailing mood. These early fictional works also identify the themes which were to occupy Yeats’s poetic genius for the remainder of his life.



John Sherman

First published in 1891, John Sherman and Dhoya was Yeats's third separate publication. The stories were reprinted in the 1908 Collected Works in Verse and Prose.

John Sherman, Yeats's only completed attempt at realistic fiction, details the title character's dilemma. He is a lazy chap and quite uninterested in pursuing a woman for marriage but gradually gets in the race. He is confused not just between two women but also between two places to settle down. He must choose between life in London and marriage to Margaret Leland, an English girl, and life in Ireland and marriage to a childhood sweetheart, Mary Carton.

The story has a lot of autobiographical elements. The town of Ballah is modelled on Yeats's Sligo. The themes center around Yeats's persistent ideas, which came later in his life, such as the debate between nationality and cosmopolitanism and the conflict between what he would later call the Self and the Anti-Self. In the end, Sherman reaffirms his Irish roots, and Margaret Leland's affections are transferred to Sherman's friend, the Reverend William Howard.

But this is not the end of the story. In a long kind of postscript, and a fantasy addon, we now encounter Dhoya. He is a giant of a man that the ancient race of Fornorians held captive until he escaped into the woods , living alone and sleeping in caves . One day, he feels a vague female presence and follows this wispy creature that turns out to be a beautiful woman who has emerged from the depths of the sea. This secret marine life is a world where people are always happy, singing and dancing, without ever growing old. But the catch here is they cannot love, and that is why she has come out of the sea and has found Dhoya. Hence she pursued love and found what she wanted.



The connection between the realistic and the mythical story is about the main themes of the story -


Love
Sherman and the Dhoya’s woman are both looking for love and choose the path to clear the dilemma in their hearts.


Change
In both the stories, everything is changing, and humans are victims of change and uncertainty. Sherman was reluctant to change and Dhoya’s woman had to think about leaving her familiar secret world where nothing changes.

Love Poems -William Butler Yeats - 162 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Secret Rose: Love Poems -William Butler Yeats

The Secret Rose (1897) is a collection of poems by W.B. Yeats. The collection exhibits Yeats' devotion to mythology and occult much more than romance and is a display of symbolism. "To the Secret Rose" opens the collection. The poem, inspired by Yeats' membership in the Rosicrucian Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.


The themes of the poem are religion, myth and Irish history.


'Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre,

Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir

The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold

Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes

Saw the pierced Hands and Rood of elder rise '




The "Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose '' is a portrayal of utopian longing. This was inspired by Yeats' own romance with a lady Maud Gonne, which was unfulfilled. He waits for an ideal life and future with her.

Essay - W B Yeats - 161/365 of reading one short story every day.

A Remonstrance with Scotsmen for Having Soured the Disposition of Their Ghosts and Faeries. - Essay

‘ in Ireland there is something of timid affection between men and spirits. They only ill-treat each other. Each admits the other side to have feelings.’

This short essay is a satirical and reprimandable take on people who don't believe in spirits or worse, questions those who ridicule people who do believe in them. Yeats throughout the essay shows the core of Ireland is about folk tales and stories ranging from many centuries. He says one should embrace that identity as part of the nation’s culture and heritage.



He compares the two countries Scotland and Ireland and says,

‘In Scotland you are too theological, too gloomy. You have burnt all the witches. In Ireland we have left them alone.

You have discovered the faeries to be pagan and wicked. You would like to have them all up before the magistrate. In Ireland warlike mortals have gone amongst them, and helped them in their battles, and they in turn have taught men great skill with herbs, and permitted some few to hear their tunes.’

The Man and His Boots - W B Yeats - 160 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Man and His Boots is a funny and scary story about a man whose boots are haunted. Based in Donegal, the man is at first unwilling to believe in ghosts or haunted houses. But one night, the house decided to finally make him believe in the supernatural world.


‘ after the night had fallen, and everything had gotten very dark, one of his boots began to move. It got up off the floor and gave a kind of slow jump towards the door, and then the other boot did the same, and after that the first boot jumped again.’

The Untiring Ones - W B Yeats -159/365 of reading one short story every day.

The Untiring Ones


This story is another part of The Celtic Twilight. It concerns humans who were enchanted by the fairies. He specifically talks about the Donegal farmers and peasants who,

‘ danced on and on, and days and days

went by, and all the country-side came to look at them, but still their

feet never tired.’

Love with them never grows weary, nor can

the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet. The Donegal

peasants remember this when they bend over the spade, or sit full of

the heaviness of the fields beside the griddle at nightfall, and they

tell stories about it that it may not be forgotten.'

A Teller of Tales - W B Yeats - 158 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Yeats was not simply an observer of Irish folk belief. He came to it already very interested in the world of the occult, a thinker of the way of spirits, accepting of the reality of Irish experiences, and even having direct experience with the spirits themselves. He was influenced by the folktales of course but the rich and harsh landscapes of the country - moors, cliffs, deep forests - all contributed to his imagination.

According to many scholars, the three main threads of Yeats’ life and mind were:

Aestheticism

Nationalism

Occultism


A Teller of Tales - a part of the collection of stories called The Celtic Twilight.

The Celtic Twilight is divided into two parts. The first, was in 1902, but some pieces as early as 1892, are small notes or essays Yeats made in West Ireland when he was travelling or gathering stories from the local people.

The second part of the book are poems set in Ireland and relevant to his exploration of the spirit world of Ireland.

Yeats was not just a story or poem writer but a listener too. All the poems and the stories in this collection are as if heard or observed from others. Thus the teller is not Yeats but all those who contributed to him through their experiences , past folk tales and from his note taking. His favourite “character” was Paddy Flynn who suffered from old age, eccentricity and deafness, but experienced the full range of spirits and beings.

“He was a great teller of tales, and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, fairyland and earth, to people his stories.”

What makes this section of the book so interesting is Yeats’ participation in this quest of the spirit (mainly fairy) world. He tells us:

“. . . in Ireland there is something of timid affection between man and spirit. Each admits the other side to have feelings. There are points beyond which neither will go.”

Yet a couple times he has people tell him how they deal with the fairy world:

“They always mind their own affairs and I always mind mine.”

The Celtic Twilight is a book of encounters. The encounters Yeats writes of are the meetings between the Irish folk and native people and the faeries.

Death - a poem by W B Yeats. 157 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Death - a poem by W B Yeats.

‘Death’ was written in 1929 and included in Yeats’s 1933 volume The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Yeats examines human attitudes to death, contrasting them with an animal’s ignorance of its own mortality. He says that humans live as if there is no end. He focuses on the wrong behaviour of humans which lead them to think of their immortality - pride, ego, violence, superiority, self worship etc



'Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

Many times he died,

Many times rose again,

A great man in his pride.'

The poem, then, suggests an ambivalence: when we breathe our last breath on this earth, do we merely replace one kind of existence with another? What happens to us when we die?

Illustration of A Black Tower, Ireland. W. B. Yeats’ final poem, ‘The Black Tower’, is dated one week before his death on the 28th January 1939.

When You Are Old - Poem - William Butler Yeats -156 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. His first collection, Crossways, was published in 1889 when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry was clearly influenced by Romanticism. As his career developed and literary innovations came with modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, Yeats’s work retained its focus on traditional verse forms and rhyme schemes, but he became more political and realistic.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.



When You Are Old is a poem by Yeats.

The poem was published in Yeats's second collection, The Rose (1893). In the poem, the narrator makes us think ahead to old age. He strongly suggests that the addressee will soon regret being unwilling to return the speaker's love. The tone here is of one lover requesting, literally pleading and alternately warning the addresse of his love not being responded to. Most critics agree that the poem is about Yeats's relationship with Maud Gonne, an Irish actress and nationalist. Though the poem is known to be based on a much earlier sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, a 16th century French Renaissance poet.



'When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep'



Themes

Love and Beauty

“When You Are Old” is a bittersweet poem that reveals the complexities of love. The poem argues in favour of a kind of love based not on physical appearances—which fade over time—but on the inner beauty of the soul.

The speaker contrasts his own love for the addressee with the inferior love described above. The speaker’s love, the poem argues, will stand the test of time because it is based on the addressee’s “pilgrim soul” and the “sorrows” of her “changing face.” That is, the speaker perceives an inner restlessness of this woman's soul and implies that this will express itself in her “changing face” as she grows old. The speaker, then, claims to experience love that goes beyond the surface—the addressee's face may change over time, but the "soul" that the speaker loves will not.



Aging

The poem talks about age as not just a number but also a timeline for the future of his affection. He feels that together, as a couple, they both do not have enough time to make memories.

Picture courtesy - FineArtAmerica