15. Thought Distracted

The pathos of mutability and tragic joy: ‘Man and the Echo’ read in the light of Seamus Heaney’s Oxford lecture, ‘Joy or Night.’ Explication and contextualization of ‘Politics,’ the lyric Yeats intended to be read as his poetic last word, as a final Maud Gonne poem. Yeats’s affirmation of life and of love compared to that of James Joyce, as expressed by Molly Bloom in her reverie, ending with the word ‘Yes,’ in the climactic pages of Ulysses. The frustrating but poetically fruitful Muse-Poet relationship with Maud Gonne as both curse and blessing to Yeats, with (in Maud’s own words) ‘our children your poems,’ immortal children with ‘wings.’