Sailing to Byzantium

[Ophelia]

Hi,

While studying Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, I’ve noticed in these lines:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing,

that the poet used the verbs “clap/ sing” in the present tense but without an “s” . WHY ?


I know that my question is not related to literature, but rather to grammer. But I have no other place to go to .

[IrishCanadian]

Besides the romantic feel that the rhyme gives the poem it may actually be a poetic device for the aged-ness (um poetic lisence? lol) of the man. Perhaps I'm reading in too deeply but it seems to be more of a comand to fight the age than a current action.
I love Yeats, I grew up on him, what are you studying him for? Sailing to Byzantium is an earlier (and therefore lighter) poem of his, so are you in highschool?
Hurray for Yeats!

[kpeinado]

Hi there: the verb "clap" is in subjunctive form, probably to emphasize that the act is not yet realized, and is unlikely to be. As you probably know, English uses subjunctive in such locutions as "I prefer that he come later," or "I suggest that John resubmit his essay." It is a sort of imperative.

[BritLitTeacher]

Your question might be more literary than you think. Yeats was influenced by Romanticists such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and for many Romantic poets the Soul existed as a collection of all souls. For the Romantic poet, a collective Soul flows through each individual. American Romanticists, particularly Whitman, bought into this idea, and perhaps Yeats was paying homage to Romanticism. Yeats also believed all ideas came from a single source, a type of mental well that supplies people with images and thoughts. Maybe this is his Soul. To get back to why clap seems to be in grammatical disagreement with the subject Soul, Soul is plural, if you buy into the Romanticism view, so clap, without the 's', should be plural to reach subject/verb agreement.

[Mortis Anarchy]

Wow, I learned so much. Ha! This helped with my own poetry analysis. psst...Yeats is my favorite poem..."Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

[IrishCanadian]

Ahh my dad has that one memorized. Makes my mom glossy eyed. haha. Thanks for the slightly beter insight guys. I don't have a favorite Yeats ... there is too much between his partiotism and love for Maud Gonn. But I like to just sit here and think about how wonderful he is.
*sigh*