Famous william butler yeats quotes10/31/2023 The poem ostensibly describes someone walking through a “yellow wood” and coming across a fork in the path. This evocative line comes from The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (1874-1963), an enormously popular but frequently misunderstood poem. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the road less traveled by” Misunderstanding of this light and ironic poem have led to tragedy it spurred Frost’s friend, the writer Edward Thomas, to enlist in WWI, where he was killed at the Battle of Arras. Instead, the powerful final line gets quoted by itself because so many people can relate to the idea of entrusting their hopes and dreams to the person they love.Ĥ. In many volumes of Yeats’ poetry “Aedh” is replaced by “He” in the title of this poem, and many people, reading this poem by itself, don’t realise this mythological background. The speaker is Aedh, a character who forms a mythology of the poet’s own invention along with two other characters, collectively known as “the principles of the mind”. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” To add a couple of lines to the most famous line for context, the full quote is: The poem starts off by describing beautiful things such as “embroidered cloths” and “gold and silver light” the speaker says that if he possessed these things he would spread them beneath the feet of the person to whom the poem is addressed. This beautiful line ends a short poem by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), entitled Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams” Yeats’ poem quoted in graffiti in Charlton. The poem’s other famous line is “Nature, red in tooth and claw”, which suggests the idea that nature may not be governed by divine intervention.ģ. The poem also raises questions about the clash between traditional Biblical beliefs and the theories of contemporary scientists about evolution (it was published just before Darwin unveiled his theory of the origin of species). Unlike a funeral elegy to a particular person, however, it reflects on bigger concepts, such as the cruelty of nature and death. The poem, entitled In Memoriam A.H.H., took Tennyson seventeen years to write, revealing how deeply his friend’s death had affected him. It was written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, about his (probably purely platonic) friendship with Arthur Henry Hallam, who had died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage. “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” Tennyson’s memorial on the Isle of Wight.Ī favourite quotation of the recently bereaved (or, more commonly, the recently dumped), this line does not, in fact, refer to someone who has lost a lover. This is a subtlety overlooked by the numerous references to this speech in popular culture.Ģ. Life, he implies, is bad but death might be worse. However, the Elizabethans believed that those who committed suicide would be eternally damned (he refers later in this soliloquy to “the dread of something after death”) – which adds an extra complexity to Hamlet’s dilemma. The implication here is that pain in life is inevitable – “outrageous fortune” has this fate in store for us, and it is for us to choose whether we face up to our “sea of troubles” or end them in death. Spoken by Hamlet himself, these words question whether it’s better to live and face one’s troubles, or die and be rid of them. That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,Īnd by opposing end them? To die: to sleep The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer “To be, or not to be: that is the question: William Shakespeare wrote these immortal lines in Hamlet, and to make better sense of them, let’s look at a few more lines: We have our most illustrious playwright to thank for one of the most famous quotations in the English language. “To be or not to be: that is the question” The gravedigger scene features another often misquoted line: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.” But they’re all more complex than they seem to be when they’re taken out of context, and in this article, we look at where these famous quotations come from, who wrote them, and what they really mean.ġ. Some are endlessly paraphrased in newspaper headlines or popular culture others find a new calling as inspirational quotes. Out of countless millions of lines of beautiful poetry, a few lines have resonated with a much wider audience to become some of the most memorable and quoted words in the English language. From Elizabethan plays to tragic war poets, English literature is blessed with some incredibly moving and cleverly constructed verse.
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