To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time Free Essay Example

The rose as a sign had mytho-historical and personal overtones for Yeats, and this poem is the opening song of his early collection of poems entitled “The Rose”. As a sign for Ireland it represents both the Romantic motion and the Irish Revival focusing around Lady Gregory and the Abbey Theatre, and the increased atop the cross in particular stimulates the Christian conversion of the native Celtic people in between the fifth and seventh centuries.

As part of the part aesthetic, part political effort to forge the Irish character through literature, Yeats and his peers drew product directly from the ancient myth cycles of the pre-Christian Celts, and infused their poetry and drama with the heroic characters and ethos, and often the language, of the time prior to the British intrusion and profession of Ireland.

Thus, Yeats’ invocation of the Rose in a way reminiscent of the ancient Greek and Roman poets’ invocation of the muses to assist in the structure of the epics of their race.

So Yeats asks the rose to be near “while I sing the ancient ways”, and as he remembers the mythic figures in the reconstitution of his race.

The Druid stands as a basic sign of the Celtic world ethic before the Christian missionizing; Cuchulain is an Achilles-like hero who single handedly beats a number of the enemies of his individuals before giving in to his own weak points battling against the sea; Fergus is a mythic king of Ulster and sign of the golden era of Gaelic civilization.

Personally, the increased signifies the figure of, and his undying– though unrequited– love for Maud Gonne, at when a personal love and a realization of his vision of Romantic Irish womanhood. It is for that reason fitting to learn that “the adjoined increased and cross” (“the rose upon the rood of time”) likewise “symbolised a mystic marital relationship”, according to A. Norman Jeffares, in his edition of Yeats’ picked poems.

In all this, Yeats wishes to find behind the edifice of all the “bad silly things that live a day”, and concealed in the pastoral simpleness of the folk tales and incomes of rural Ireland that are the source for much of the mytho-poetic product he utilizes, “Eternal appeal wandering on her way”.

So he sings, “Come near, come near, come near”.

But “Ah”, he exclaims after the verse break, not too near, but “leave me still / A little space for the rose-breath to fill”. Yeats here acknowledges the danger of losing the idea behind the symbol; the objects of his effort behind their abstraction. Like Stephen Dedalus, who acknowledges the importance of experience to forging “in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”, Yeats guards against over reification at the expense of the material reality.

Lest he adopt the patriarchal tone against the poor and under-educated he was trying to influence that many of his contemporaries were guilty of, and “seek alone to hear the strange things said” and “chaunt in a tongue men do not know”, he would allow a little space for the material and sensuous “rose-breath” to remind him of the realities of Irish life in his own time.

Thus his almost Burnsian concern for “the field mouse” and “the weak worm”, and the reality of “heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass”. Though somewhat a product of the sentimental Romanticism of his youth, this very accomplished and important poem is a premonition of the hard and by turns cynical lyrics of his later career, where we will see the Romantic rose of Ireland transformed into the rape of a Swan, and, in some ways too, the rough beast “slouching towards Bethlehem to be born”.

For now, he will sing with innocent hope of the utility of “the ancient ways” for moulding the cultural and political identity of his people, some twenty years before the events which will make him proclaim “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”. In 1893, if nothing else, the uncreated conscience of a race seems secure in the symbolic weight of the “Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days”.

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