Thinking Activity:On Being Asked for War Poem by W.B.Yeats

 Hello Beautiful People,

I am Riddhi Bhatt. You know...what is today's blog ?This blog is about W B Yeats - Poems giving. As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called The Twentieth Century Literature: 1900 to World War II (paper-106).Our professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir discussed this unit and assigned us one of the most creative tasks to interpret and given to answer this question. Here first we know some brief introductions about W B Yeats.

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.Throughout his long literary career, Yeats continued to mature and grow like an artisan, and this the most admirable thing about Yeats. His poetry is characterized by the dreamy flourishing style dull of lulling rhythms. … He started using brief and terse diction, and consequently, his poetry matured in density

Evaluate 'On Being Asked for a War Poem :

"On being asked for a War Poem" is a poem by William Butler Yeats written on February 6, 1915 in response to a request by Henry James that Yeats compose a political poem about World War I.Yeats changed the poem's title from "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" to "A Reason for Keeping Silent" before sending it in a letter to James.It’s one of Yeats’s shortest well-known poems, comprising just six lines, and sets out why Yeats chooses not to write a ‘war poem’ for publication.

On being asked for a War Poem

I think it better that in times like these

A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth

We have no gift to set a statesman right;

He has had enough of meddling who can please

A young girl in the indolence of her youth,

Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

Structure Note of this poem : 

This poem is a sextet, with a rhyme scheme ABC, ABC. The first three lines refer to the poet’s attitude to writing about war; the next three lines write on the self-imposed limits of the poet’s interventions in the world.In terms of its form, the poem is written in iambic pentameter, rhymed abcabc. The final two lines are the only ones which might cause some real head-scratching from readers (and critics), but Yeats appears to be making an appeal to the broad readership that poetry (including his poetry, by 1915) enjoyed: young girls might enjoy his romantic verses about old Ireland, while an old man might enjoy the ballads.

Who has ‘asked [Yeats] for a war poem’? :

t was the American novelists, Henry James and Edith Wharton – who were good friends and who both came to live in Britain – who approached him: Wharton was editing an anthology, The Book of the Homeless, the profits from which would go towards helping refugees of the war. That anthology appeared in 1916, complete with Yeats’s contribution, which appeared under the alternative title ‘A Reason for Keeping Silent’.

Why did Yeats refuse to write a ‘war poem’? :

In February 1915, Yeats had written to his friend Lady Gregory: ‘I suppose, like most wars it is at root a bagman’s war, a sacrifice of the best for the worst. I feel strangely enough most for the young Germans who are now being killed.’ Yeats goes on to say that the ‘bespectacled’ Germans he has seen remind him more of himself than the English soldiers (‘footballers’) or the French troops.

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‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem about refusing to write a war poem when asked to produce one. This odd act of refusal-as-assent – writing a poem, but a poem which takes a stand against writing a certain kind of poem – has the air of irony about it, and Yeats probably intended his poem to be taken as a brief ‘thanks, but no thanks’

The opening statement is forthright and conversational about “times like these”, or times of war- the enjambment, or running over the end of line, mimics everyday speech. When the poet writes of “a poet’s mouth” being silent, he is using a technique called metonymy. Like metaphor, metonymy substitutes one thing for another. Metaphor does this by contrasting different things (“He was an animal”) but in metonymy, something closely related to something else is substituted. For example: “the crown” may refer to the Queen or royalty, or “the press” may to refer to the newspapers. Both are closely connected. Here, the “poet’s mouth” represents (because it speaks) his poetry.

“meddling”: Another word for interfering. This key word in the poem gives us a hint of the poet’s attitude to those who try and write activist or political poems: they are ‘meddlers’, troublesome interferers. The tone is obviously negative. “Meddling” in the lives of old men and young girls carries a lighter and happier tone however- a sense of play.A quick change in imagery and reference point, from the macrocosm to the microcosm, from the world of politics to the world of intimate acquaintances.

“an old man on a winter’s night”: this completes the scope of the poet’s influence. Does this mean that poetry is suited to everyday lessons and life? That the poet’s role is to appeal to beauty and wisdom, youth and age? These certainly seem narrower limits to the role of poetry than ‘setting statesmen right’. Yeats, however, would surely argue that poetry’s concerns are higher than political contingency.

The mention of the word "silent" in the title published in Wharton's collection, appears contrary to the construction of poetry or the poetic voice. In the poem "Politics", Yeats begins the poem where "On being asked for a War Poem" finishes with the opening lines:

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

Although "Politics" describes a different political situation facing the world in the 1930s, Yeats again chooses not to focus on politics but the "girl standing there."

Here I am putting video of our class discussion on  this poem....

THANK YOU....