Abstract
Men Improve With The Years was written by W. B. Yeats in 1916 by the time he had turned 50 years old. This paper argues that in this poem, Yeats presents his philosophical thoughts of the tragic life among human beings, highlighting that the joy in tragedy is “the way to survive” while the sorrow in tragedy is “being towards death”. Influenced by Nietzsche’s aesthetic notions of the Apollonian and Dionysian art, Yeats holds a kind of tragic aesthetic view towards death—“the unity of being” of individual life and nature, and aims to seek the joy of growing old and the freedom to create life out of life. As Apollonian dream covers the tragedy of life and Dionysian intoxication discloses it, the nameless old protagonist in the poem or Yeats himself attempts to bear the plight with stoicism and fortitude like a marble Triton so as to conquer and welcome all the sorrows in the process of aging and dying. Since men improve with the years, “being towards death” is the nature of living. Yeats hopes to achieve the aesthetic redemption from the tragic life in his early fifties, thus giving enlightenment to the predicament of human existence.
Highlights
This paper argues that in this poem, Yeats presents his philosophical thoughts of the tragic life among human beings, highlighting that the joy in tragedy is “the way to survive” while the sorrow in tragedy is “being towards death”
The joy in tragedy, and the sorrow in tragedy are all reduced to the satisfaction of the everlasting life. Yeats in his early fifties, “the year of destiny”, sends out a message of hope for the eternal life in tragedy with the poem Men Improve With The Years
He persuades himself to “observe and abide by the boundary and conform to reality” (Zhou, 2017: 144), and believes that happiness and pain are interwoven, and all human beings can weave the threads of life into whatever garments of belief that please and warm them best (Yeats, 2003)
Summary
1916, the year that his best-known Easter, 1916 was born This poem “explores a strategy of romantic self-consolation” and has “proved a poor prophet of events”—Yeats proposed to Iseult Gonne in August 1916 and again in 1917; he married George Hyde-Lees, aged 25, and before long fathered two children (Ross, 2009: 154-155). It was first published in The Little Review (periodical), June 1917, included into The Wild Swan at Coole, a collection of twenty-nine poems and the play At the Hawk’s Well in November 1917 by the Cuala Press and republished in March 1919 by the Macmillan without the play but with an additional seventeen poems:.
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