Yeats’s Themes and Motifs

Abstract

The theme of a poem is its dominant idea, its subject-matter perceived as a concept. The subject-matter of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, for example, may be a landscape and the creatures, including the swans, which inhabit it, and the poet’s feelings about it. But the theme could be said to be the idea of change and mutability. Very often we speak loosely of a theme when a more appropriate word would be motif, a recurrent image or idea. In the following, I have organised Yeats’s themes around a variety of key concepts and images, ‘motifs’ in this sense. Analysing a poet’s themes is complicated by the fact that such themes are usually not presented directly, but are present implicitly in a poem. They are, that is, embodied in the poem, and have to be read out or deduced by us, from a particular description of events or place, the evocation of a mood or feeling, an image or cluster of images. What the poet declares to be the theme of the poem, by fixing a particular title to it, may mislead us, and then part of the meaning of the poem is this very discrepancy between its declared and its actual theme. The latter is sometimes called a subtext.