Are You Content?
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1938. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2034, and this site is served partly from American servers. So for now we give the notes without the full text; it will appear here in 2034.
It begins: I call on those that call me son
In brief
SummaryThe old poet asks his ancestors to judge whether he has done well.
Yeats calls on his dead ancestors, those who would call him son, grandson or great-grandson, to judge his life's work. He asks whether, by putting everything into words, he has spoiled what his forebears handed down. The dead can judge; he cannot, and he is not content. The second stanza names the ancestors: a man of Drumcliff, a red-headed rector in County Down, the Corbets of Sandymount, William Pollexfen, the smuggler Middleton and the Butlers. The third imagines a quiet old age by the sea, only to reject it again.
Lines to remember
I cannot, but I am not content.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 8Calling the ancestors
He summons his forebears, uncles and aunts included, to judge what he has done. Has he, as the one who put it into words, spoiled what "old loins" passed on to him? Eyes made spiritual by death can judge; he cannot, but he is not content.
Lines 9 to 16The family roll-call
A roll-call of forebears: the man who set up the old cross at Drumcliff in Sligo, a red-headed rector in County Down who was good on a horse, the Sandymount Corbets, William Pollexfen, the smuggler Middleton, and Butlers so far back they are half legendary.
Lines 17 to 24Not content
Old and infirm, he could settle into good company, smiling at the sea, a man who always hated work. Or he could live out Robert Browning's image of an old hunter talking with gods. Either would be a fitting old age, but the refrain returns: he is not content.
Themes
Ancestry
Yeats roots himself in a line of clergymen, merchants, horsemen and even a smuggler. The names in the second stanza give him a solid, local past in Sligo, Dublin and County Down. He speaks to them as judges, as if his work must answer to the family that made him.
Restless old age
The third stanza offers two peaceful pictures of age, idle by the sea or talking with gods, and refuses both. The repeated "I am not content" is the voice of a poet who will not settle, the same restless energy found in "The Spur" and "An Acre of Grass".
Judging a life
The poem is a self-examination. Only "Eyes spiritualised by death" can see clearly enough to judge. Yeats does not claim success; he leaves the verdict to the dead and admits his own dissatisfaction.
Context
The poem was first published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938), when Yeats was in his seventies. It returns to the ancestors he had honoured in the opening poem of Responsibilities (1914), where he asked his "old fathers" to pardon him.
The figures are generally identified as Yeats's forebears: the Drumcliff man as his great-grandfather John Yeats, rector there; the County Down rector as his grandfather; William Pollexfen as his mother's father, a Sligo shipowner; and the Middletons as his Sligo relations. The Browning image is usually traced to the early poem "Pauline".
Form
Three eight-line stanzas in short lines of three or four beats, rhyming mostly on the even lines. The first and last stanzas end on the same refrain about not being content, so the family roll-call is framed by the poet's unease. The plain, list-like middle stanza reads like a family record.
