By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The words ‘things fall apart’ are perhaps most likely to call to mind Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel about life in Nigeria and the collapse of colonialism in West Africa. But if those three small words set off another literary resonance in people’s minds, it’s doubtless going to be W. B. Yeats’s 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’, which is where the quotation originated.
‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. This line of Yeats’s has come to embody the mood not only in his native Ireland during the struggle for Irish independence, but also the broader post-war sense of things shifting and changing, of old worlds dying away and new worlds struggling to be born.
The Second Coming
Yeats began writing his poem ‘The Second Coming’ in January 1919, just a couple of months after the Armistice marking the end of the First World War. And although the poem went through various iterations, the notion of ‘things’ falling apart would be central to the poem.
Yeats’s poem begins:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
The ‘gyre’ metaphor Yeats employs here, conveys circularity, repetition, and the cyclical nature of history (which, as the proverb has it, repeats itself). The gyre is an image taken from Yeats’s mystical belief that history does indeed run in cycles, so the idea of a ‘Second Coming’ of a Messiah-figure fits with this theory.
Sure enough, in the run-up to the millennium, many people began to consider the possibility of this ‘Second Coming’ more: 2,000 years after Christ had last come down to earth, would he make a return? And what form would he take?
Things Fall Apart
Then we come to the third line of the poem, which is surely the most famous in ‘The Second Coming’:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
The problem, of course, is that the gyre is ‘widening’: it is getting further and further away from its centre, its point of origin. As a result of this, it’s losing control, and ‘the centre cannot hold’. Without that focal point, the centre, everything is chaos. The poem continues:
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Note how Yeats’s words in the above passage suggest the chaotic nature of world events and the disaster this spells: ‘loosed’ and ‘world’, between them, summon this worldwide anarchy, but the two words then become joined in that doom-laden word, ‘worst’, a few lines later.
In other words, Yeats’s poem prophesises that some sort of Second Coming is due, and that the anarchy that has arisen all around the world (partly because of the events of the First World War, though the tumultuous events in Yeats’s home country of Ireland such as the 196 Easter Rising are also behind the poem) is a sign that this Second Coming cannot be far off.
The Breakdown of the Old Order
Yeats’s poem reflects a turbulent time of transition in Europe and, to an extent, the world more widely. Old traditions and the class-dominated social order that had held sway before the war – one might consider the ‘upstairs-downstairs’ world of ‘differently-dressed servants’ with ‘tiny rooms in huge houses’ which Philip Larkin brilliantly summons in his poem about pre-war England, ‘MCMXIV’ – were giving way to something new.
But what would that new social order look like? It was too early to say in 1919, as it was still struggling to come into being, and Yeats’s poem brilliantly captures this sense of the old certainties crumbling away, and the uncertainty surrounding what would replace them.
In 1916 the Easter Rising marked a significant moment in the struggle for Irish independence from Britain, while the Russian Revolution of 1917, which had swept away the old royal family and a whole social order with them, was still in the too-recent past and it was impossible to tell what new world might emerge from that moment of violent energy.
Yeats and Achebe
Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart picks up on Yeats’s phrase and uses it to describe life in Nigeria, Achebe’s home country.
The First World War, only recently over when Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’, had shaken up empires, and, indeed, led to the fall of four of them (the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, German, and Russian). Empires really were falling and ‘things’ really were ‘fall[ing] apart’ in 1919 in the wake of the Great War.
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Thanks for this. While it’s true that the horrific ‘Great War’ inspired Yeats’ poem, at about the time he was writing it his newborn daughter was ill and ‘Spanish flu’ was taking young lives all over Europe and the U. S. Two more reasons ‘the centre cannot hold.’ My blogs, ‘Such Friends: 100 Years Ago’ started with 1920 so don’t capture that time in his life. But this is one from the beginning of his third American tour: https://suchfriends.wordpress.com/2020/01/30/such-friends-100-years-ago-january-30-1920-new-york-city/
Achebe’s novel depicts the beginning of colonialism in the nineteenth century, not its end!
The poem is apt in that it depicts the flying apart of traditional society and religion and the humiliation of its leaders by christianity – it is a “rough beast” that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born in their eyes.
Yes, so fascinating this connection between Yeats and Mr. Achebe and relation to the Great War. These moments (years) of transition in various societies where the ‘centre is not holding’ seem to be coming quite fast and frantic lately . . . certainly in the U.S., sadly.
And should you teach Mr. Achebe’s masterpiece, here is a great instructional resources:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Things-Fall-Apart-by-Chinua-Achebe-Comprehensive-Test-3548369
Yeats may have European turmoil vaguely kept in mind, but the focus of this poem is on his native Ireland – on the civil war raging between the IRA and the British Army ever since the Easter Rising of 1916. All the usual decencies of social interaction seem to have been set aside. Yeats develops this theme in his poem Nineteen Nineteen. He sees the civil war as a national catastrophe. He seeks for a divine revelation and sees an image of ruthless brute force made worse by a controlling human intelligence – “lion body with the head of a man”. Yeats seems to have viewed the European war as none of Ireland’s business – an outlook set forth in An Irish Airman Foresees His Death: “Those I fight (the Germans) I do not hate./Those I guard (the British) I do not love.” As editor of the Oxford Book Of English Verse, he excluded the British war poets, and as Director In Chief of the Abbey Theatre, he refused to stage The Silver Tassie – the finest play Sean O’Casey wrote – which dealt with the impact on Irish society of the Great War and the plight of wounded veterans.
It was Wilfred Owen specifically Yeats excluded from The Oxford Book Of Modern [not English] Verse and Robert Graves excluded himself, though others (Rosenberg and Rickword, for instance) are omitted, possibly from ignorance. On the other hand, Yeats did include Herbert Read’s long The End of a War.
Thank you for the correction and for filling in the detail. It seems there was no love lost between Graves and Yeats, who comes in for a scathing denunciation, along with others, including Dylan Thomas, in Graves’s essay There Be Your Gods, O Israel in his collection The Crowning Privilege.
In British terms, the fighting of 1919 may be seen as civil war. In Irish terms, it was a War Of Independence, leading to the creation of the Irish Free State, later named The Irish Republic. More carnage followed, in the form of a fratricidal war between different factions in the Republican movement, so, alas, the vision of The Second Coming continued to hold good, and acquired more vigour in the Northern Irish troubles of the 1960s and seventies.
I have heard Irish people refer to the events for which the British term is “the Troubles” as “the war in the north.”
Some borrowings (almost quotes) in this piece from Gramsci and Marx. Would it be fair to have the attributions?
Hi Ian. Would you please point out the alleged borrowings from Gramsci and Marx? Thanks.
“ … old world dying, new one struggling to be born … “ is an expression associated with Gramsci. With that in my mind, I found “… history (which, as the proverb has it, repeats itself) … “ reminded me strongly of Marx so that I wanted to add “ … first at tragedy, second as farce … “
Interesting. I wonder if Gramsci was recalling Matthew Arnold? ‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born …’
Gosh! I don’t know enough about Arnold but a quick Google search could take me down plenty of rabbit holes. Arnold, Gamsci & the Arab Spring! And a forty-year old paper drawing on them both! And someone else deliberately pondering on the “wandering between two worlds.” I don’t know enough!