Studies in English Language and Literature

  An Acre of Grass by W. B. Yeats: Thorough Analysis Stanzawise (line by line)/line by line explanation of "An Acre of Grass" by Yeats William Butler Yeats was born in 1865 and he breathed his last in 1939. After his superannuation from all kinds of public activities in 1932, the poet determined to permanently settle in Riversdale. The poem An Acre of Grass , published in Yeats’ Last Poems , was composed in about 1936 to 1937. So, as we see, the poem was composed in the last phase of his life. The poem is structurally composed of four six-line stanzas. That is to say, it is written in four stanzas of six lines each. Let us now analyse the poem thoroughly below: Stanza 1 When an old man is at the last phase of his life, when he is at life’s end, when he is at the brink of death, he has to chiefly depend upon the descriptions in “Picture and book” for “An acre of green grass” to have fresh “air and exercise”. Note the poet’s expression in the very opening line of the poem:

Verse Libre or Free Verse We come across the idea of free verse in French. In France, it is called vers libre . This kind of verse is also called polyrhymic verse. However, such kind of verse has its lines composed without a regular metre and usually without rhyme. The great father or the great pioneer of the form was Walt Whitman. The modern poet's  Leaves of Grass (1855) constituted a manifesto of free verse. The epigraph from Leaves of Grass is an excellent example of free verse: "Come, said my soul, Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one,) That should I after return, Or, long, long hence, in other spheres, There to some group of mates the chants resuming, (Tallying Earth's soil, trees, winds, tumultuous waves,) Ever with pleas'd smile I may keep on, Ever and ever yet the verses owning—as, first, I here and now Signing for Soul and Body, set to them my name" It is actually a term that describes many forms of irregular, syllabic or unrhymed verse