In this paper I would like to demonstrate to the reader that, despite having similar sources and being one the best student of the other that has ever existed, William Blake and William Butler Yeats deal with authority in different ways, “authority” being a different thing for each one of them.

By authority I mean something that is beyond their power and against which they rebel, something that is crucial for each of them, as will be explained later in this paper. The way each of them does all of this and the attitude they give to the speakers of their poems are very important facts as they reveal aspects of the authors, as I will show, especially because Yeats studied Blake widely and yet he extracted from Blake what he wanted and left or changed some other important elements; sometimes, the addition of a characteristic to a shared idea is decisive step that moves one away farther than one may imagine.

This is also something very important in this paper, because it goes directly to a core issue that makes them clearly diverge.

Therefore, I will mainly focus on the differences between them, but I have to make clear that, in order to do so, I need to tell the similarities first as the differences will stem from them. It is the fact that the “student” will move away from his “master” and the reasons why he does so what will structure this paper in a subtle way.

I will show this by analysing two poems, namely: “The Garden of Love”, by William Blake, and “The Second Coming”, by William Butler Yeats. Later on, I will introduce the poem “The Tyger”, by William Blake, which I believe is very helpful to understand one of the major metaphors in Yeats’ poem.

Context

Before comparing these two authors, we need to know basic ideas about them or we will get lost among so many concepts, for these poets base their works on their complex conceptual systems.

One of the principal elements that vertebrates their ideas is the Bible. This book is the origin of all of Blake’s concepts and all the ideas that compound his way of understanding the world. However, he was not a close follower of the Church nor of any religious organization, but a rather free thinker who considered that the Church and the various official interpretations of the Bible were wrong and misleading and therefore there was a need for a new interpretation that took people to the original understanding of the Bible and to the beginnings of the Christian Church when its values were really the core of everyone’s life.

For that purpose, William Blake created a set of works that depicted his principles and the concepts that vertebrated his view of the world, in which he considered the ideals that the world was lacking, despite his having drawn them from the same book used by those he opposed. For him, the Bible was as appropriate as it was for the Church members to explain and understand the world, and he would defend it and consult it. He was so faithful to the Bible that he even picked up the same archetypes used in the Bible, like God or Jesus, and made them protagonists of his works with different names, like Urizen or Golgonooza, doing the same kind of deeds. (Blake Study Guide)

We must bear in mind the importance of the Bible and organized religion for Blake as he will even devote some of his works to attack organized religion and what it entails, that is, religious denial and authority, as we will see in The Garden of Love. For this author, the Church is simply the destroyer of all the good virtues that the Bible advocates. (Blake Study Guide)

However, this is not exactly the same for William Butler Yeats. Despite his being Blake’s disciple and his having learnt and extracted so many ideas from him and the Bible, and applied them to his works, he has been influenced enough by other authors like Aldous Huxley and Darwin, although he refuses to apply their ideas in philosophy and work as they contravene his imagination and he scorns their scientific progress and adopts a “kind of traditionary primitivism”, to move away from the line his “master” follows and have a personality of his own in his works. (1920 Yeats, Second Coming)

However, this is not the biggest difference between these two authors regarding how they consider the Bible. Despite Blake’s several alleged visions, they seem to happen spontaneously, they were not sought out and they could be compared with inspirations related to religious beauty that came to him. (William Blake on Wikipedia) Contrary to this, Yeats was more esoteric and more research oriented than Blake and several important concepts coming from the Golden Dawn and his psychic experiences were incorporated into his belief system, like that of the Spiritus Mundi that I will analyse later on. (1920 Yeats, Second Coming)

I must stress now the importance of myth besides the Bible because it will be of importance for both Blake and Yeats. While a big part of Blake’s myths belong to the Bible, there are several archetypes related to nature too, as the one of the tiger in one of the poems I will analyse, or the garden as a playground of innocence. [Blake Study Guide] On the other hand, William Butler Yeats taps frequently into Irish traditional myths since it is his pillar to face the social context that I will describe later.

Another core belief that both Blake and Yeats share is the division of the human being into four elements (Blake’s Four Zoas [wikipedia] or Yeats’ Four Faculties), which, described in Yeats’ words, could be named like this: Will or ‘normal ego’, Mask or ‘desire’, Creative Mind or ‘thought’ and Body of Fate or ‘attainment’. Together with this go the ideas of contraries and negation. Contraries are elements that balance each other and there is a need for them to be balanced, negation is what happens when one tries to dominate another and then chaos takes place. (Yeats’s Vision: The Faculties)

However, for Yeats, there is another fourfold division that relate to the aforementioned, including more ideas drawn from the esoteric circles he used to visit. This, altogether with the idea of cycles and the cyclical quality of life and history are very recurrent concepts for William Butler Yeats. (Yeats’s Vision: The Human Constitution)

The two shared concepts, contraries and negation, are specially applied to the four elements and with them alone these two authors seem to explain many of the major problems in society.

Analysis

The poems that will be analysed, as stated earlier, are:

-The Garden of Love:

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And "Thou shalt not" writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briers my joys and desires. (The Literature Network)

-The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (The Literature Network)

The next poem will be compared metaphorically later in this paper to help us understand the meaning of an important metaphor in Yeats’ poem.

-The Tyger:

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? (The Literature Network)

(This latter will be compared metaphorically later in this paper to help us understand the meaning of an important metaphor in Yeats’ poem.)

Starting the analysis from a more external and physical layer of the poems, one notices from the very beginning the clash of styles between Blake’s two poems and Yeats’ one. As the title of the work where Blake’s poems can be found states: I am dealing with songs meant to be sung and thus they are better structured, except for some cases, such as the fourth line in “The Tyger”, that does not fit in the feet structure of the poem. On the other hand, “The Second Coming” has longer lines and 10 more lines than Blake’s “The Garden of Love”, which makes room for more content.

“The Second Coming” is a poem divided in two stanzas, written in a blank-verse pattern with several exceptions, like the third and fourth lines, which have a consonant rhyme. Only fourteen of twenty-two lines consist of near ten syllables, which means that up to 8 lines out of 22 are different, enough to disrupt the pattern. The lack of structure is reinforced by the existence of eight enjambments (for example, fifth line, seventh line, eleventh line) and eight caesuras (as in the eleventh line). Yeats also makes use of special sound devices, such as the three stressed syllables in a row in line 21: “what rough beast”; the repetition of words as in the first two lines of the second stanza at the beginning and the end of them “surely...at hand”. (1920 Yeats, Second Coming)

This causes a great confusion in the mind of the reader, as the poem is constantly ignoring the structure, which adds to the complexity and the shock that the metaphors generate in the reader’s mind when it is read.

The question at the end of the poem has not been ignored but I prefer to leave its analysis for a later stage in the analysis of the poem, to be aware of all the factors taking part and have a better overall idea.

Contrarily, I find that Blake’s poems are more regular, divided into stanzas of the same length, four lines each one, smaller lines (The Tyger’s lines have 7 syllables and The Garden of Love’s, 8 syllables). The rhyme in The Tyger is consonant, except for some lines, which do not fit, like the fourth and the last lines ending in “symmetry”; each stanza rhymes A A B B, being the first and the last ones different with a pattern of A A A B. In The Garden of Love, the rhyming pattern is more instable, nearing that of Yeats’ poem, because the first stanza’s pattern is A B C B, the second stanza’s is A B A B and the third one completely lacks rhyme.

In The Tyger there is a series of stylistic features that cannot be ignored. The repetition of “Tyger!” both in the first stanza and in the last one, which is an almost identical repetition of the first stanza, makes the poem start with intensity and picks it again at the end to maintain that same atmosphere. The stylistic figure aims to convey the force and the danger that a tiger represents for a person who is before it, as the speaker is. Another figure is the caesuras one can find throughout the third and fourth stanzas, which are composed of small questions that increase the tension and anxiety that the speaker feels towards the tiger. The abundance of questions that we find along the poem cannot be dismissed and it indeed is another feature conveying the feeling of anxiety, this time generated by the doubt the speaker has.

One must never forget that one thing is the speaker and another thing is the author. I share the opinion with some experts that, while the speaker shows one attitude by asking those questions, William Blake is trying to deliver a message with what the speaker asks and the supposed answers one may give to the speaker’s questions. (Blake Study Guide)

In the poem “The Garden of Love”, two features stand out. One of them is the fact that a few nouns are written starting with a capital letter, these are words directly related to the topic of the poem, namely: Garden, Love, Chapel and Priests. Many other nouns appear in that poem that do not start by a capital letter, such as: gates, door, flowers, graves, tomb-stones, gowns, briers, joys and desires.

The fact that this is so could be interpreted as if William Blake intended to make them stand out and to stress their importance in the poem. In fact, these four words conform the two parallel dimensions between which the poem moves: the Garden is where Love can be found and the Chapel is where the Priests profess their religion. Once the reader realises this, he or she starts to understand the core of the poem. These capital letters stand out enough to make the reader wonder.

Another characteristic of this poem is the repetition of the word “and” at the beginning of 7 lines, out of the 12 lines that compose the poem. This fact stresses the importance of the appearance of this word and therefore it should be taken into account. This repetition, apart from being a direct consequence of any enumeration, aims to stress the fact that the speaker is adding one fact after another, as if amassing them and making bigger and bigger his astonishment.

To sum up what has been said in this stylistic analysis, Yeats’ poem is much more confusing stylistically speaking, not conforming to the structures and mixing patterns, increasing the sense of chaos and loss of control that the poem gives metaphorically. Blake’s poem The Tyger also gives a feeling of confusion because of the several caesuras and questions, but, in this case, the poem produces more anxiety than confusion, similarly to Blake’s other poem The Garden of Love with the repetition of the word “and”, which, contrary to The Tyger, does not generate confusion in the reader, but rather astonishment, besides the shared anxiety of the speaker in both poems.

Therefore, a chain can be formed with the three poems, going from confusion and chaos to anxiety and astonishment, all of these being typical feelings of a speaker that thinks what is happening surpasses him or her and that something terrible is ruining the speaker’s world and life.

Before starting the analysis of the messages of the poems and the metaphors with which they have been expressed, I would like to analyse the division to the poems in different stanzas.

Yeats’ poem is composed of two stanzas of different length; the first one has 8 lines and the second one, 14. This renders a rather imbalanced feeling of the poem, giving more importance and pouring more information into one than into the other. This fact acquires more relevance when we acknowledge that Yeats structures his poems in a definite stanza pattern.

In the first stanza, the speaker usually expounds a general vision, a portrait of the world or of the part of the world in which the speaker is more interested. (Yeats’s Vision: “The Second Coming” and “A Vision”) One can find several references to the world in the first stanza at a first glance, words like “things”, “anarchy”, “world”, “everywhere”, “the best”, “the worst” are clear and direct references to objective elements in the “physical” world (“anarchy” is not a physical object but it exists in a world external to the speaker).

When reading it closely, the reader may find some metaphors that refer to the external world, despite having an underlying belief system that makes the speaker regard this world outside him in a very biased way, a belief system widely related to Yeats’ social situation and about which I will talk later. Such metaphors of the external world are two, one occupies from the first line to the third and the other from the fourth line to the sixth. Whereas the first one focuses on the direction that the world has taken, always from the point of view of the speaker, the second one is more concrete and describes in better detail the situation of the world, possibly as a consequence of the direction referred in the previous metaphor. (Yeats’s Vision: “The Second Coming” and “A Vision”)

Nevertheless, the second stanza is completely different, although it is closely related to the first one. The second one focuses more on a personal vision, the speaker moves on to describe the world after a process of mental transformation and adaptation, interpreting it and selecting some pieces of it to later connect them all in a completely different way. This is reflected in some concepts as “revelation”, “Second Coming”, “Spiritus Mundi”, “my sight”, “shadows”, “sleep” and “nightmare”. All of them are spiritual concepts, they do not have a physical reference and if they do, these are not used in the poem, as happens with “my sight” or “shadows”.

We are walking on a metaphoric plane all the time and if there is anything that one considers that is a clear reference to the physical world, then the reader should think about it again. There are four important metaphors in these fourteen lines alone, one chained to the next, in such a way that not a single verse is left without a metaphor.

This is a proof that Yeats uses the physical world as a support to apply his beliefs, he introduces the part of the world that interests him more to give us a context to understand what he later says in the second stanza. His point of view is of a social inclination, as he speaks of “the best” lacking “conviction” and “the worst”, he introduces a political concept, namely, “anarchy”. These are very sociopolitical concepts that serve as a base for the vision the author has of the coming future, not only a vision as a spiritual experience, but also as what the poet thinks will happen.

However, the fact that this is described as a “vision”, that is, an experience that the speaker has and in which a message is delivered, and this kind of visions is usually taken as true, may be a way to make the reader think that this will indeed happen.

Therefore, there is an intention in the poet to convey this message, and the reason why Yeats wants to deliver this idea is because he really hopes that it will take place, following his ideal of the cyclic history, which supports his wish for something to appear suddenly and stop what threatens his reality. This is better explained in the historical context.

Blake’s poem “The Garden of Love” has a simple structure, its three stanzas can be divided as follows: the first one deals with the first encounter with the Garden after some time and there is a mix of what the speaker sees in the present and the memories the speaker has of the Garden; the second stanza describes how the Chapel is and when the speaker is finished with the most important features of it, goes on to give detail of what used to be a Garden, still remembering what was; the last stanza keeps on describing the new graveyard, stressing the presence of some people whose main role in the paper is to complete the mental and spiritual torture that the new Chapel is for the speaker.

The change that we witness as we move from stanza to stanza is a distressing and depressing one, taking into account the breaking-off with a joyful past, the disappearance of beautiful things and the last line; contrary to that we find Yeats’ poem, which ends with the hope that something or someone will come and change what is told in the first stanza of “The Second Coming”, where the speaker also depicts a depressing scene, especially with the last two lines of the first stanza.

Finally, the structure of “The Tyger” is also a simple one, starting with an introductory stanza that gives us the necessary ideas to start with, mainly focusing on the tiger’s characteristics and its process of creation. The second, third and fourth stanzas reflect on everything surrounding the creation of the tiger in such a way that gives us ideas about the characteristics of the tiger (eyes in fire, twisted heart sinews, dread grasp). (Schroeder, Juergen Matthias)

In the fifth stanza, the speaker goes beyond everything that has been asked before, which is of a more concrete nature, narrating celestial events hard to know that took place when the creation was finished, and also the speaker goes beyond the poem when he links it to another poem, “The Lamb”, by the same author. (Schroeder, Juergen Matthias)

This other poem, however, will not be explained here. I think it is enough to say that, following the poet’s idea of contraries, he created “The Lamb” to depict the concepts Blake relates to “innocence” in his “Songs of Innocence” and its contrary is “The Tyger”, written in the “Songs of Experience”. As a result of this, as has been explained before, William Blake thought that it was necessary that the lamb and the tiger balance each other and that is the reason why the speaker poses that question. (Blake Study Guide)

The poem ends with a sixth stanza almost exactly like the first one, but the change of one word for another completely alters the interpretation we must make of this last stanza, going from the astonishment of a creator that managed to create such a creature to the fear of seeing that someone –or something- was courageous enough to give birth to the tiger.

Therefore, Blake ends the poem again with anxiety and fear, but we must remember that the speaker of the poem is not necessarily the poet and they may differ in their respective points of view. There is an anxiety from the speaker because with him Blake intended to represent the common adult person who fears “the tiger”, which in Blake’s conceptual system represents the Energy, that element in ourselves that we usually repress. (Blake Study Guide) And Energy, or Imagination, is what Blake defended the most, especially against reason, what the poet considered to be “the cause of the division of the world into contraries.” (Byrne, Joseph)

As a consequence, we must not take much into account the fact that the poem ends in such a fearful way, because it does not represent the poet’s attitude, we must bear in mind only the fact that the common adult would fear such a beast, because we will see that Yeats is not afraid of certain powerful beast that he presents us in “The Second Coming.”

Now that I have already completely described the structures and the tools that the poets use to convey their messages to the reader, I will analyse in depth the messages alone and finally connect them in such a way that will support the initial thesis of this paper.

I take Yeats’ poem as the work where we will find the clues to the conclusion when compared to Blake’s poems. It possesses the features we need to compare it with the other two poems, in it we will see if Yeats conforms to Blake’s vision of the world or not, and also, Yeats’ poem is the only one who has an epistomologic structure that is spread out throughout the whole poem; as a result, “The Second Coming” will be the reference among the poems, although it is Yeats who has digressed with Blake and, therefore, in terms of concepts and beliefs, William Blake will be the reference.

As we have already seen, from the very beginning, both poets are confronted in “The Garden of Love” and in “The Second Coming”, there is a change in the world, a world which was before accepted by both authors and which matched their needs. There is a difference here, however, because, while the change in Blake’s poem is set and finished and what the speaker does is to keep on describing what has changed, Yeats states that the change is going on and on, it is a spiral, it goes farther and bigger, it keeps on “turning and turning”. (Yeats’s Vision: “The Second Coming” and “A Vision”)

Another difference is that this change has consequences in the modernist poem, because the “falcon cannot hear the falconer” the farther it goes, and then “things fall apart”, some parts of the world is being dismantled, the previous social and cultural structures cannot be kept, because the change is going on and “the centre cannot hold.” Whatever was known is now changing and this is too powerful and important to be easily stopped and restore the previous reality.

Nevertheless, the importance of the change in “The Garden of Love” is not smaller, because this poem is about the passing from innocence to adulthood and the world inevitably changes for the person, especially his or her vision or point of view of the world. Yet, Blake does not write anything about the consequences of this change, only the last line may be considered as such, because the new Priests that came with the new Chapel now, as a consequence, “bind with briers [the speaker’s] joys and desires.”

The word “vision” here is important, because that means that it is subjective, personal, depending on the previous ideas one has of the world, despite the fact that everybody suffers this kind of change.

These two authors play very much with this concept, which is indeed praiseworthy, because it introduces the relativity of everything and the need for not imposing one’s personal truth. However, I need to stress that what Yeats considers as a fact is somewhat biased and not simply the statement of a reality. This will be seen when I analyse the second stanza of Yeats’ poem, which, as has already been said, is more related to his personal vision.

In the fourth and fifth lines of Yeats’ poem we start to understand more deeply what the poet meant with the previous lines, especially with the word “anarchy” in the fourth line. We find in these lines the matching part of reality that relates with the first three lines, with special emphasis in the third line where the poet says “the centre cannot hold”. As we all know, the loss of centre, politically and socially speaking, is called anarchy. This loss of control or anarchy is clearly connected and compared with a blood-dimmed tide because of the use of the same verb: to loose; the reason why the poet makes this connection has a sociohistorical explanation, contemporary to the time when the poem was written, which will be dealt with in the historical context. (1920 Yeats, Second Coming)

Compared to Blake’s “The Garden of Love”, there is not an anarchic loss of control but a rather tyrannic loss of freedom, a change from one state to another, from the freedom of the Garden to the prohibitions of the “Thou Salt Not” in the Chapel, from the abundance of joys and desires to their binding by the Priests. It is not the disappearance of the ability or the power of a “centre [that] cannot hold” the stability of society anymore, but the imposition of a Chapel “where [the speaker] used to play on the green.”

Here there is another major difference among Blake and Yeats: while the first devoted his work to attack and counter organised religion in all of its forms (Vines, Timothy) (besides other reasons which are not as important as this one), Yeats entered the Golden Dawn, another form of organised religion, and adopted many of the beliefs and spiritual concepts from them, as we see in some concepts Yeats adopted from the Golden Dawn (Show China) and with which he formed one of the belief systems that vertebrated his works. (Webster, Michael) The sphinx mentioned later in the poem is also a concept drawn from the Golden Dawn and other esoteric sources. (Yeats’s Vision: “The Second Coming” and “A Vision”)

The sixth line in Yeats’ poem expresses a similar process of the same nature as what Blake’s “The Garden of Love” is all about but in a very different context. William Butler Yeats was speaking of the loss of certain values the poet believed to be superior and important in favour of other values rising at the historical moment, therefore, the poem’s focus is on a sociohistorical issue. (Friends of Oswald Mosley) In the case of Blake’s poem on the loss of innocence, the process is of a psychological nature; the drowning of innocence is the binding of joys and desires.

The seventh and eighth lines is again another reference to the physical world, as the fourth line is, although one should take into account that “the best” and “the worst” are very relative concepts that do not generally coincide to those everybody may have. In “The Garden of Love”, however, we do not find such physical references, because everything in the poem is a symbol that links to elements in the psychological process of maturing. It is clear there are references to physical elements such as a Chapel or a Garden or flowers, but they are not concrete things that the reader could find in a definite place, as happens in Yeats’ poem, but rather a general reference to what those physical elements do to the person.

At last, at the beginning of the second stanza we find a reference to the title and we begin to understand, from then on, what the poem is about. With the parallelism of the first two lines in the second stanza we realise that the “Second Coming” is a revelation. There is nothing like this in the poems by Blake with which we can deal here. The only mental process that takes place in the romantic poem is the remembering the speaker does.

This “Second Coming” refers to the second arrival of Jesus Christ on Earth, but Yeats is telling us that the Christian saviour will not come with his ironic “surely”, stating that any hope or prediction that someone will save us of all the disasters and massacres taking place at the moment in which he wrote will not be wiped out. This shows us the disdain W. B. Yeats had towards Christianity, contrary to Blake’s fondness for the Bible. (Cohen, Adam) This fact may easily be the reason why these two authors, despite sharing so many concepts and beliefs, differ so much in their works and attitudes.

The next metaphor that the poem offers is very important and gives us such an insight on the poet and the sense of the poem that completely changes everything the reader may have thought of it. The sphinx, which is the idea to which the poet refers in the metaphor of the fourteenth line, aided by the previous and the next lines, has a blank and pitiless gaze, represents the brutality and destruction that he found so satisfying, especially of those elements that jeopardised his so valued aristocracy. (The Second Coming (poem) on Wikipedia)

This boasting of power and brutality has nothing to do with Blake’s Tyger, which is as feared as Yeats’ beast but for different reasons. While Yeats’ beast power may come from its size or from another source we are not aware of and while it is used for destruction for its own pleasure’s sake, the Tyger just represents the power with which the Energy imbues it; in fact, Blake’s animal does not pose any danger, it is just the fear people have towards that part of their being which Blake calls Imagination, due to Reason’s domination. (Blake Study Guide) It is interesting to realise that, although the vast majority fears Blake’s poem’s protagonist, as happens with Yeats’ sphinx (The Second Coming (poem) on Wikipedia), both authors feel at ease with their respective beast.

The reasons for their use despite the difference between their view and the reader’s view are also very different. While Blake’s purpose to write such a poem like “The Tyger” was educational, or, as Joseph Byrne puts it, “to help cleanse the “doors of perception,” to bring [the reader] to enlightenment through imagination”; Yeats’ sphinx raison d’etre is just a consequence of the amazement this archetype caused in William Butler Yeats much before his writing this poem. (The Second Coming (poem) on Wikipedia)

Some other characteristics can be compared, such as the link with fire that both creatures have. In Blake’s poem, this can be seen in the second stanza, where the speaker associates the creature’s eyes to fire; moreover, we should not dismiss the fact that it was created in a furnace where the fire is the element used for the creation of whatever is produced there.[http://www.englishromantics.com/rom_analyses2.htm] In the case of Yeats’ beast, the author compares his gaze (or eyes, for that matter) with the Sun, commonly associated with the same poetical characteristics of the fire, and the only reference to the context of the beast that we have is a desert, another concept widely related with fire for its high temperatures.

Despite the fact that they seem to be sharing the concept of fire, the truth is that there is another element in Blake’s poem that shows us this has nothing to do with what really happens. I am talking about the environment where the poem places the tiger. The speaker refers to it twice in the poem, in the first and the last stanzas, Blake’s tiger can be found “in the forest of the night.” The forest, among other things, is a place of abundance in general and plenty of life, despite the interpretation some may offer as it being a hostile and dangerous place, the truth is that Blake does not make any interpretation of it in the poem, the author just mentions it linked to the night to express the mystery and passion shared with the animal. This is completely opposed to the desert where the sphinx is found, a hostile place where few beings dwell and the few inhabitants struggle for survival. In this sense, the desert can be interpreted as the result of the destruction of all the life that existed before the place was transformed into a desert. One may argue that there is not any interpretation or element in the poem that makes us think of the desert as a hostile place, but line 17 refutes this argument with the shadows, an element that inspires secrecy, danger and hostility, and the indignant birds, which are the vultures, symbol of hostility which reminds us of their waiting for our death for them to feed on our corpses when our death has come, death and destruction being very close concepts.

Another difference between the romantic poet’s tiger and the Irish poet’s sphinx is activity and passivity. In Blake’s poem, we are not informed of any movement or action done by the animal, the only verb in the active voice that is associated with him is “to burn”. This action does not require any change nor is it voluntary. Its “burning bright” is a characteristic inherent to it, a consequence of its abundance Energy. On the other hand, the sphinx is an active character, it is moving, slowly though, but moving, it has a direction, it makes use of its power with each step it takes, it reels the shadows as it walks. A beast with such a pitiless gaze and with its fondness of destruction (The Second Coming (poem) on Wikipedia), we have no doubt that any movement it makes will cause fear to whoever happens to be around it or whoever is where the sphinx intends to arrive. This contrasts with the fact that the speaker will surely have the tiger before him, the speaker is asking questions to the tiger as we can see by the speaker’s use of the second singular person when posing the questions and nothing in the poem makes us think that the speaker has suffered any injury or has been attacked by the tiger by the end of the poem.

All of this depicts two different portraits of these creatures, while one is perceived as dangerous, threatening and is carrying out a series of actions that must produce chaos wherever it goes (The Second Coming (poem) on Wikipedia); the other is also perceived as potentially perilous and yet we know that it is a belief the speaker has, representing the common adult, although Blake feels completely secure with it.

Continuing with the analysis of the poems, the next line in Yeats’ poem starts with a darkness that has come back once more, which informs us of the cyclic nature time and history have for the Irish poet. (Yeats’s Vision: The Human Constitution) It entails that there was a time when there was darkness, and now it is dropping again. It is part of the transition of one era to another.

If we analyse darkness in Blake’s terms, we will realise that the romantic poet relates it to older people, people who have matured and who pertain to the world of Experience. These people’s tendency to darkness is due to their preference to take actions without them being noticed by others, especially by children or people in the Innocence. (Blake Study Guide) This does not seem to be applicable to this case, but we must bear in mind that Yeats was looking forward to the arrival of this change of era, as it meant the end of the reing of Christianity, which the poet so much scorned (Cohen, Adam); therefore, the arrival of this darkness must be appealing to him too. This is not like the dark in the night of the Tyger or the black gowns of the Priest. The former just being an element revealing the fear adult people have of Imagination and the Energy and, as a result, the connection they make between Imagination and danger. The latter is an expression of what was said at the beginning of the paragraph, because, for Blake, people who “don’t want us to see what they are doing to us” love darkness. (Blake Study Guide)

Restraining again my analysis to the comparison between “The Second Coming” and “The Garden of Love”, the following two lines in Yeats’ poem confirms what has been said about the cyclic nature of history and the nearing of a change in era. By what we can read in Neil Mann’s website, these lines refer to the coming of the opposite of what Jesus Christ, referring to the reign of Christianity of 2000 years with “the twenty centuries of stony sleep”, and to the return of the antithetic of Christ with the “nightmare”. (Yeats’s Vision: “The Second Coming” and “A Vision”) Although this opposes what the Priests in the poem “The Garden of Love” may wish or believe, it is neither the solution for the speaker in that poem, as what he wishes is the restoration of the Garden. However, as we have said, the Irish poet is looking forward to it.

Finally, Yeats ends in a question that leaves the poem open and ambiguous, waiting for an answer to remove this doubt. However, despite its being a question, the poet already knows several facts, namely: that it is a rough beast, that his hour has “come round at last”, another reference to the cyclic nature of history, and that it slouches towards Bethlehem (“The Second Coming” and “A Vision”), where the person this beast will succeed was born, meaning that this rough beast will be the substitute of Jesus Christ.

It may be thought that the rough beast and the sphinx are the same creature, as both of them have the same aura of terror and destruction and both appear in an active mood because both are moving. The fact that these metaphors appear in the same poem may make us think that they are the same but it is not shown explicitly so it cannot be stated as a fact.

This ending differs from Blake’s poems’ endings, especially from the one in “The Garden of Love”, where the Priests bind “with briers [the speaker’s] joys and desires”, that is, the speaker surrenders to what threatens him and there is not any possibility to avoid it. In this sense, Yeats’ poem is more optimistic, always from the point of view of Yeats, which is looking forward to the arrival of this rough beast.

Historical context

In this section the reader will find the connections that he or she may have deduced so far throughout the paper.

The historical context in which both lived was dramatically different and yet both were equally agitated. The kind of events that took place at the time of each author will be critical in their attitudes towards life.

Whereas the optimism of the American and French Revolutions, defending human rights and managing to create new laws for these rights, flooded the lives of those who lived at the time, among whom we find William Blake; we find on the opposite extreme the moment that William Butler Yeats lived when he wrote “The Second Coming”: the aftermath of the WWI, the coming Independence War in Ireland, where he is from and the rising Bolshevik revolution defeating the old order in Russia. (Cohen, Adam)

These events have such a negative effect on Yeats’ attitude for two reasons: the most common reason is because of the havoc that they generate, altering societies and nations from their very foundations, but the other reason is that these events aim to erase aristocracy and high classes he was fond of (Cohen, Adam), to which the Irish poet has always been so attached since he was born, also because this aristocracy supported the hierarchical and pastoral values he himself defended and, with aristocracy, it was easier to hold and live by the spiritual values. Aristocracy was also good to economically support artists so they could create the works they desired and they did not have to live as others had, that is, having to sell their works and be hired to create what others told them to do. Yeats defended the old values and wanted to restore nobility, high culture and the organic comunity. He also believed that, with democracy and capitalism, a proliferation of “inferior people”, or so he called them, would take place. (Friends of Oswald Mosley)

The American and French Revolutions also defended human rights and William Blake had great hopes for them, and it is in things like this one where we can see the most important differences in both authors. (William Blake on Wikipedia)

His reason for his way of thinking was that he thought that spirit should be over the materialistic, reason and blood over the spirit of money, blood being culture and tradition. [http://www.oswaldmosley.com/people/yeats.html] Although this may sound similar to what Blake said, the fact is that the romantic artist thought that there was a need for balance between Spirit / Energy and Reason (Blake Study Guide), and also between all the other contraries in the world, whereas Yeats did not hold such a thing as true.

Conclusion

I hope this paper has shown clearly enough what I intended to explain all the time: it is not the poems what matter, it is not the historical context what matters, it is the person who lives and writes the one who decides how he will feel and interpret all the events in his life and in the world at the time in which he lives.

These two authors shared many ideas, concepts and beliefs. Both of them had a deep interest in spirituality and what was beyond the visible world. And this same thing converted one of them into the teacher of several centuries and the other into a poet which is still nowadays very misunderstood.

They also lived in very active and difficult times and each one took one side of the fight, according to their personal values. And maybe also according to their “social classes”: Blake being always a poor artist who did everything he could to create his works in such a detailed way and Yeats being born in a wealthy family. (The Literature Network)

Perhaps what caused this great difference was the fact that, while William Blake believed that the human being was divine and that it had a special connection with God (Blake Study Guide), the other had a deep disdain of Christianity (Cohen, Adam), and lacked such an ideal.

And only by understanding their minds and hearts, will we manage to understand their poems.

WEBLIOGRAPHY:

Fraser, George. “Blake Study Guide”, Home page, West Georgia University. 10 Jan 2008 < http://www.westga.edu/~gfraser/Blake Study Guide.doc>

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