Politics Poetry Poem by shiv chandra jha

politics poetry-shiv chandra jha
In the poem, there are many opposites that appear to challenge each other: age and youth, intellect and emotion, and male and female. The implication that the young are in each others arms, to Nicholas Meihuizen, highlights the poet's age and its adverse relationship to the youth of the poem's lovers. As the poet speaks of turning his inability to turn his 'attention' from 'that girls standing there' to 'politics', the poet presents the battle of intellect and emotion, a battle which emotion wins in the poem. Likewise, Meihuizen argues that the poem presents sexual longing in the final line as the poem ends with the combination of the male and female in sexual union.[5]

The conflict between the girl and the political surroundings mentioned in the text is, according to critic Charles Ferrall, an extension of a correspondence Yeats had with Olivia Shakespeare in which Yeats suggests that there is a relationship between Fascism and aesthetics. While Yeats never embraces Fascism the way that Ezra Pound did, the theme of the relationship between art and politics appears to focus heavily on that particular form of government as it was the prevailing political force in two of the three countries mentioned in the poem.[6] However, Yeats was consistently elusive on political matters throughout his literary career and carefully avoids taking a position in 'Politics'. Michael Bell, in his essay 'W.B. Yeats: 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities'' suggests that in 'Politics', Yeats 'treads a dubious line between honesty to mood and a would-be seductive fecklessness'.

The retreat from the political world suggested by the poem's title and carried out throughout the text of the poem also implies that the poet is inclined to create what Glenn Willmott calls a 'narcissistic paradise'. According to Willmott, Yeats's poems often move from the world of social interaction to a place where the individual finds seclusion, as is also the case in the pastoral Yeats's earlier poems 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree, 'The Song of the Happy Shepherd', and 'The Sad Shepherd'. All of the poems create a 'utopia' in which the poet finds relief from public life by withdrawing from social spheres and entering into a mythical setting, yet 'Politics' is unique in that it lacks the pastoral qualities of the earlier works and finds solitude in a different time rather than a different place.