Comparison of Meditations in Time of Civil War

Yeats implies that self-possession is useless as, with the inevitability of death, comes the inevitability that one day avouchership will be lost when-as Yeats puts it-the master is ride. The accompaniment that mice preempt play one time the masters buried brings together a new Idea of owning-or possessing-people and the Idea that by dint of this ownership comes a hierarchy which leads to people being treated like mice. The fact that they can at once play, now that the master has gone, Implies that the master oppressed them through his ownership of them. However this section of the meter where the mice play is linked to a preceding section which talked of dreams.They are linked through rhyme. In the previous section, which starts Mere dreams, mere dreams And continues until As if some marvelous empty sea-shell flung, has the rhyming scheme A. B. A. B. A. The fact that Yeats has similarly given the section, that Includes the mice playing, the same rhyming scheme, Indicates t hat this Is a mere dream and that the ownership is still present and unavoidably to be relinquished before they can play. Walcott in particular references the idea that-through the idea that one mankind owns another-the humanity and the rights of the owned human can be stripped away.This links to Walkouts main theme of the buckle down trade. The line some slave is rotting in this manorial lake shows this idea the best. By describing the lake as manorial Walcott has linked the ownership of the lake to the death of the slave and thus Implements the owners In the Implied crime. This could lead to the desire to renounce ownership of the lake so as to escape the implementations associated with it. The line protecting the great household/ from guilt shows that with ownership comes the privation for pride in possessions-also shown in the Yeats poem with the escutcheons ours.However, Walcott also makes reference to the idea that the mice can play once the masters buried. Walcott has be en described by critics as a poetry pirate from other poets and uses them for his own purposes. This is the most obvious way Walcott challenges the idea of ownership. He takes these lines-such as Part of the continent, piece of the main- and uses them ironically for his own meaning. It is often ironic as the original meaning of the lines is normally the opposite of what Walcott uses them for.This contrasts to Yeats-who implied that the idea that the mice can play is a dream-as Walkouts poetry piracy is an example of the mice playing. Indeed it links with the Yeats line And maybe the great-grandson of that house s but a mouse. Walcott, a descendant of slaves, is this mouse and-by taking ownership of lines that others own-he is playing. This shows how the shackles of ownership, set upon the slaves in Walkouts poem, have been relinquished by the inevitability of the loss of ownership and by the leprosy of empire.