Tricked by W. B. Yeats
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Posted by Linda Sue Grimes Jun 21, 2008 |
People love apocalyptic declamations that seem profound and prophetic. Whenever there is a crisis in the world (and the world is never without a crisis!), folks like to point to a well-known poem and say yes that describes how things are today.
An example of this phenomenon can be seen in the many articles and books written with titles of lines from this Yeats poem. If you google “Things fall apart”+”New York Times,” you’ll get close to 40,000 sites.
W. B. Yeats was a great poet and a deep thinker. He constructed a work that he called A Vision, which, in fact, is nothing more than his own statement on poetics. It is a dense work but fundamentally flawed.
Yeats often misconstrued concepts to the point of turning them on their head—a topic about which I began writing with my doctoral dissertation and which I will continue to address.
However, I am focusing here only on one technical issue with the poem. This issue is a minor one in comparison to the philosophy on which it is based, but still, it is important that the reader is aware of this problem: the conflation of the bearer and the born in the last two lines of the poem: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Because, to my knowledge, the absurdity of these lines has never been discussed, I have written two articles explaining the problem: