W. B. Yeats, selected by Seamus Heaney

New syllabus (first HSC 2027). This text is prescribed for the 2027 to 2030 HSC under the English Advanced 11-12 (2024) syllabus (focus area: Critical study of literature). The NESA edition is WB Yeats: Poems selected by Seamus Heaney (Faber and Faber, 2005). Yeats was not on the 2019 to 2026 list.

The set poems and the edition

The prescribed edition is WB Yeats: Poems selected by Seamus Heaney (Faber and Faber, 2005). Seven poems are set for 2027 to 2030: The Wild Swans at Coole, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, Easter 1916, The Second Coming, Sailing to Byzantium, An Acre of Grass and Long-legged Fly. The year shown for this page is the year of the 2005 edition. Yeats's own career began in the 1880s, and the set poems range from the years around the First World War to the late 1930s.

The poems are Yeats's, and they are out of copyright in Australia, so the quotations below come from the public domain text and were checked at the linked pages. Heaney's choice of poems and his introduction are separate, copyrighted work, so this page does not quote him. Anchor your essays to these seven poems.

Why this text suits Critical study of literature

Critical study asks for a close reading of a body of work as a constructed whole, with a sense of how other readers have judged it. Yeats offers an unusually long creative arc, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, in which the poet repeatedly revises his own style, symbols and position. A selection by another major poet adds a second layer: you are reading Yeats, but through a selector's eye. That makes the text well suited to questions of value, because it invites you to ask what a selection emphasises, and what a poem does that survives any editor's frame.

The shaping of a public voice

Yeats's early lyrics are often dreamy and ornate, drawing on myth and a romantic Ireland. Over time the voice hardens, becoming more colloquial, more political and more willing to argue with itself. When you analyse a poem, identify where it sits in that development, and say how the diction, syntax and rhythm carry the change. A late poem that opens with a blunt statement of exclusion or refusal, such as the opening declaration of Sailing to Byzantium that this is no country for old men, shows a voice using plain assertion as a dramatic opening move.

Political violence and the problem of the public poem

Easter, 1916 is a poem about how a poet should respond to an event that changes a country. It is built on a refrain and on the contrast between the speaker's casual acquaintance with people before the Rising and his shock afterwards. The line at the end of the first stanza, about a terrible beauty, sets paradox at the heart of the poem: change is both awful and glorious, and the poem refuses to settle on one view. Later the poem asks how long the sacrifice should last before it hardens the heart into stone.

The Second Coming, another set poem, also answers public crisis, but through apocalyptic image rather than an elegy for named people. Compare how the two poems turn upheaval into form. Strong analysis of such a poem covers its ambivalence. Do not claim that Yeats simply celebrates or condemns. Show how the stanza shapes, the repeated refrain, and the stone imagery produce a judgement that stays divided.

Ageing, art and permanence

In Sailing to Byzantium the speaker faces the body's decline and imagines a transformation into a made form of gold that sings. The poem is a compressed argument about whether art can outlast the self, and it is full of devices to examine: the controlled stanza form, the opposition between the natural and the artificial, and the metaphor of the old man as a scarecrow figure that must find a soul to sing. The Wild Swans at Coole offers a quieter version of the theme, in which the speaker watches the birds from the same shore across the years and measures his own change against their steady beauty. An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, also set, puts a speaker facing his own death in a measured, balanced form, so it is a useful third poem for a comparison of how Yeats controls feeling. An Acre of Grass and Long-legged Fly belong to the late 1930s and can show how the older Yeats treats the mind and age. Compare how each poem builds its sense of time.

Symbol, myth and form

Yeats builds his own private symbolism over decades, and some poems depend on a system of images such as the gyre, the mask and the tower. You do not need to master every part of that system to write well. Instead, treat symbols as patterns the poem teaches you. Ask how a recurring image gathers meaning across the poems in your selection, and how formal choices such as rhyme scheme, stanza length and refrain support it.

The selector's frame

Because the text is a selection, a critical response can notice the frame without relying on the selector's words. Ask what range of Yeats the selection allows you to see: early and late, public and private, political and personal. Then consider how a different selection might alter our sense of him. You do not need to know the contents of the editor's introduction, and you should not paraphrase it unless you have read it and can attribute it accurately. A short, careful remark about what your own set poems let you conclude is more valuable than an uncertain claim about the introduction.

Putting critical readings in tension

One reading treats Yeats as a poet of heroic self-fashioning, who turns private feeling into monumental form. Another stresses the poems' uncertainty, in which the speaker is repeatedly unsure and the form struggles against its subject. You can set these against each other without naming a critic you cannot attribute. Choose a poem such as Easter, 1916 and argue which reading better explains its refusal to resolve.

Common pitfalls

• Treating a poem as a biography lesson. Context must drive an argument about the poem's method.
• Discussing poems that are not among the seven set poems.
• Over-claiming about symbolic systems. Ground every claim in the words on the page.
• Quoting at length. Short, exact quotations with close comment are stronger.
• Leaning on the selector's introduction instead of forming your own judgement.

Essay scaffold

Introduction. State a considered view of Yeats's value, for example that his poems turn private and public crisis into controlled, unresolved form. Name two or three of the seven set poems and the features you will analyse.

Body 1. A public poem (such as Easter, 1916) and its ambivalence.

Body 2. A poem of ageing and art (such as Sailing to Byzantium or The Wild Swans at Coole) and how it builds time and permanence.

Body 3. Symbol and form across the selection, including what the selection lets you see.

Conclusion. Argue that Yeats holds crisis in a controlled form without resolving it: Easter, 1916 keeps awe and grief side by side, Sailing to Byzantium turns the fear of ageing into a made object without proving that art outlasts the self, and the late poems keep testing the mind against time. Say which of your set poems makes that unresolved control most visible, and what that suggests about the value of his work.

Read the text

Yeats's poems are widely available free, for example at poets.org. The Heaney selection itself is in copyright, so borrow it from a library or buy it. The edition NESA prescribes is Faber and Faber, 2005 (ISBN 9780571222964).

The NESA details on this page were checked against its published HSC English prescriptions and the English Advanced Year 12 Critical study of literature page on 7 October 2026.