Broken Dreams by William Butler Yeats

First of all, this commentary is going to focus on two poems, the first one that I am going to treat is “Broken Dreams” by William Butler Yeats and the second one is “Eyes that last I saw in tears” by Thomas Stearns Eliot.

These two poems, “Broken Dreams” and “Eyes that last I saw in tears”, were written by different authors, but they have similarities and at the same time both poems have differences.

“Broken Dreams” and “Eyes that last I saw in tears” seem on the surface to be about a person that is talking to a woman. The poems refer to the same issue which is the passing of time. Both poems remember past images of a woman, emphasized with the passing of time. Both speakers of both poems have the same thought: when women, who they are addressing to, arrive to heaven; I mean once women have died and they go to heaven, they will have returned to their youth. Both poems make constant references to the aspect of time during the whole duration of the poems.

In the poem written by Yeats “Broken Dreams”, the speaker will see the beauty again that she had been when she was young. We could observe this in the third stanza, in line 21, when the speaker says: “But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.”. Also we can observe it when the author makes allusion to: “… paddle and are perfect…” in the fourth stanza, in line 34.

In the other poem written by Eliot, “Eyes that last I saw in tears” the speaker will see the eyes without tears, maybe she will be happy, the speaker says: “Here in death’s dream kingdom/ The golden vision reappears”, we can observe it in the first stanza, in lines 3-4.

As we can find in both poems, the poets have the same idea, they will return to see them in the other kingdom. The reincarnation of the beauty when a person dies could be a sentence that summarizes, more or less, the idea of both poets. William Butler Yeats and Thomas Stearns Eliot show us the other kingdom as if it were better than our own kingdom. Bad things will disappear and everything will be wonderful. In “Broken Dreams” the young beauty will reappear and in “Eyes that last I saw in tears” the woman, who the poet is addressing, will shed no more tears, she will not cry.

The meaning in both poems is straightforward, while you are reading you can understand what the authors are talking about and referring to. I mean that these are not very complex poems when talking about their language. The authors of these poems use clear connotations to refer to what they want to mean. We can say that both authors, Yeats and Eliot, do not use elaborate language. The authors dedicate the poems to the passing of time, and they explain that in the other kingdom everything will be as it was before,