An Acre of Grass: W.B. Yeats

An Acre of Grass: W.B. Yeats
Text:
Picture and Book remain,
An acre of green grass
For air and exercise,
Now strength of body goes;
Midnight, and old house
Where nothing stirs but a mouse.
My temptations is quiet,
Here at life’s end
Neither loose imagination,
Nor the mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone
Can make the truth known.
Grant me an old man’s frenzy,
Myself must I remake
Till I am Timon and Lear
Or that William Blake
Who beat upon the wall
Till Truth obeyed his call;

A mind Michael Angelo knew
That can pierce the clouds,
Or inspired by frenzy
Shake the dead in their shrouds;
Forgotten else by mankind
An old mans’s eagle mind.

Summary: An Acre of Grass
An Acre of Grass belongs to the Yeat’s ‘Last Poems’. It is the poem of old age. Now the poet is passing a lonely and joyless life. He passes his old age in reading books, paintings and physical exercise in a small grassy land. Now he has no enough strength. His life is like a dark night. He is now as lonely as an old house where the sound of a mouse exists only.

In this stage nothing attracts the poet. He is at the last stage of life. His imaginative power has gone. His poetic power has been declined. This old man’s rest gives him truth, but it provides no means to work that truth into poetry.

The poet desires for rejuvenate himself. He longs for the frenzy of old men. He wishes to get the frenzy of mad old men like Lear, Timor, Blake or Michael Angelo who restlessly searched for truth, till they found it.