For Anne Gregory — Class 10 English — First Flight Poetry: 60 flashcards

William Butler Yeats, who lived from 1865 to 1939. He was an Irish nationalist, educated in London and Dublin, interested in folklore and mythology, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

A conversation between a young man and a young woman, and students are asked to work out what they are arguing about.

Three stanzas of six lines each. The young man speaks the first and the third; the young woman speaks the second, so she has the exact middle of the poem and only one turn.

That no young man will ever love her for herself alone and not her yellow hair, because any young man is thrown into despair by the great honey-coloured ramparts at her ear.

The high, wide walls around a castle or fort. The textbook's own example is the ramparts of the Red Fort.

Her hair — piled thick and high at the sides of her head, above and around her ears, and compared to the defensive wall of a fortress.

Because it does two things at once. A rampart is magnificent — huge and built to be admired from a distance — and it is impassable, since it exists to keep people out. The hair is the first thing anybody sees and the last thing they get past.

More than a shade. Honey is golden, so the colour is exact; but honey is also thick, rich, sweet and slow, so the word makes the hair something to taste as well as to look at.

They place the hair at the sides of the head rather than falling behind, which is what makes the fortress image work — ramparts run along the sides of a thing and enclose it.

For two reasons: the hair is so beautiful that a young man can see nothing else and never reaches the person; and it works like a wall, holding him at a distance so that the way is blocked.

It is not disappointment but the state of having given up. The young men are defeated before they begin, and they know it.

No. He never says she refuses anybody. It is caused by beauty, and nothing in the poem blames her for anything.

Yellow.

Brown, or black, or carrot — with a hair-dye.

So that young men in despair may love her for herself alone and not her yellow hair. The dye is a means, not an aim.

Because brown and black are ordinary and carrot is bright orange. Nobody chooses carrot-coloured hair in order to be inconspicuous — she is not asking to be plain, only to be seen.

That she is quick, practical and not in the least vain. A vain woman would have been flattered by the first stanza and stopped there; she treats a compliment as a problem and proposes a solution at once.

'For yourself alone' — he says love you for yourself alone, and she says love me for myself alone. It appears in every stanza, and so does the yellow hair.

It turns the poem into one sentence repeated three times with the speaker changed, which is why the disagreement feels so tightly closed.

Give the gloss first, then say the hair is piled at the sides of her head, then give both halves of the image — magnificent and impassable.

That it is not a reply. He never says the dye would fail and never engages with a word she has said; he changes the ground from what might be done to what somebody else has declared.

Three, stacked in four lines: an old man, who is also a religious man, who had found a text to prove it.

It is an old word for last night. It matters because the evidence he is producing was acquired the evening before he produced it, and none of the reasoning is his own.

That he has gone looking for support. A young man who genuinely believed the argument would have made it himself.

'My dear' — and they arrive inside the sentence that tells her nobody human can love her properly.

That only God could love her for herself alone and not her yellow hair.

A defeat. If the difficulty is the nature of human love rather than the colour of her hair, changing the colour changes nothing — dye it black and people will love the black.

Flattery in disguise. If only God can see past her beauty, then her beauty is beyond anything human can manage, which is a larger compliment than the one he began with.

That nobody is loved for themselves alone by anybody. Ask a person why they love a friend and they produce a list; love fastens on qualities because qualities are what there is to fasten on. Only a being who needs nothing and sees everything could do otherwise.

At least two, and all three if there is room. The poem does not choose, and a good answer says so.

In each stanza only the second, fourth and sixth lines rhyme — despair, ear, hair; there, despair, hair; declare, dear, hair — and the sound is the same in all three stanzas.

It means eighteen lines chime on one note from beginning to end, so the poem is formally unable to get away from the word 'hair', exactly as she is unable to get away from the thing.

Hair — all three times.

The last two lines of every stanza: love you, or me, for yourself alone, and not your yellow hair. Six of the eighteen lines are the same sentence with the pronouns changed, and both speakers use it.

Claim, solution, escalation. He states that nobody can love her for herself; she proposes a remedy; and instead of meeting it he raises the stakes as far as they will go.

No. She is given no reply to the third stanza, and the poem stops where he stops. It is a conversation that closes rather than concludes.

Who he was, what religion he belonged to, or what the text actually said. All three are left blank.

Because it links the technical observation about the rhyme to the meaning of the poem, instead of listing the rhyme scheme and stopping.

He never engages with it at all. He simply changes the subject to what an old religious man declared the night before.

The three authorities and the fact that none of the reasoning is his; 'only God' with at least two readings; the rhyme as lines two, four and six on one sound; and the refrain with 'hair' ending every stanza.

Which qualities make one object more desirable than another — a car, a phone, a dress — and what you would emphasise if you were trying to sell it.

The second. Listing qualities is easy; choosing which ones to put in front of somebody is a seller's job and a flatterer's job at the same time.

The young man names the visible quality — honey-coloured ramparts — and stops there, which is exactly what an advertisement does.

Whether we love others for their qualities, physical or mental, or whether it is possible to love somebody for themselves alone — and whether some people are more lovable than others.

A parent's love for a newborn, a challenged child and a prodigy; the public's love for a film star, sportsperson, politician or social worker; love for a friend or a sibling; and love for a pet, and the pet's for you.

Because it has done nothing — no achievements, no conversation, no qualities to speak of — and it is loved anyway, often overwhelmingly.

Whether love follows ability. If it did, the two would be loved differently and in proportion; in a decent family they are not.

Clearly against loving somebody for themselves alone, because the public knows nothing except the qualities — the performance, the batting, the speeches, the work — so the love arrived with them and leaves with them.

Because it could not be otherwise. You cannot love somebody for themselves alone when the only thing you have ever met is their work.

Because you can produce a list of reasons — kindness, humour, patience, a laugh — but you would not stop loving them if the humour went, and you did not choose your sister at all.

Because a dog does not know your marks, your salary or your appearance; its welcome is the same on the worst day of your year, and nothing you achieve improves it.

That people can be loved for themselves alone, but almost never by strangers — it takes time, proximity, or a dog.

Yeats's question from another poem: how can we separate the dancer from the dance?

That the dance exists nowhere except in the dancer's body — there is no dance sitting in a corner waiting to be performed — so the two cannot be pulled apart however different they look.

That you cannot separate somebody from how they look, sound and walk. A voice is not a coating over a person but one of the ways they exist; remove every quality and you have removed the person, not uncovered them.

It puts the dye in a strange light, since she would be changing one of the things she is rather than removing a distraction — and it suggests 'for yourself alone' may be asking for something that does not exist.

How you, or a friend, or a family member has changed over the years, and whether the relationship has changed with them.

The relationship moving with the change suggests we are attached to qualities; the relationship surviving the change suggests we are not.

William Butler Yeats, 1865 to 1939, an Irish nationalist educated in London and Dublin, interested in folklore and mythology, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

That it asks whether anybody can be loved with all their qualities subtracted, and quietly suspects there would be nobody left to love.