At Algeciras - a Meditation upon Death
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1932. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2028, 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 2028.
It begins: The heron-billed pale cattle-birds
In brief
SummaryBirds cross from Morocco at dusk, and Yeats thinks about facing God.
At Algeciras, on the Spanish side of the Strait of Gibraltar, Yeats watches pale cattle-birds fly over from Morocco to roost in the garden trees until dawn. The sight takes him back to boyhood evenings when he carried shells from the shore at Rosses Point to an older friend, hoping for praise. Now, in the glory of the setting sun and the evening chill, his mind turns to death and to God, the Great Questioner. He wonders what God may ask him, and whether he could answer with fitting confidence.
Lines to remember
But actual shells of Rosses' level shore.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6Birds from Morocco
Pale, heron-billed cattle-birds, which feed on the parasites of Moroccan herds, cross the narrow Straits to settle in the dark of the garden trees. They stay there until dawn breaks on the mingled seas, where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean. The scene is exact, calm and slightly exotic.
Lines 7 to 12Shells from Rosses
The birds recall his boyhood. On evenings as a boy he carried to a friend, an older mind whose praise he hoped for, real shells from the level shore at Rosses. They were not the shells of Newton's famous metaphor for knowledge, but actual ones: the child's pleasure was simple and physical.
Lines 13 to 18The Great Questioner
Now the glory of the sun and the evening chill set his imagination on God, the "Great Questioner". He thinks about what God might ask him, and whether he could reply with fitting confidence. The poem ends on that question, balanced between hope and doubt.
Themes
Death and judgement
The subtitle names the subject, and the poem approaches it gently. Evening, chill and a setting sun lead the mind towards the end of life, and death is imagined as an examination by God. Yeats does not describe fear. He wonders whether he could answer well, which makes the poem a quiet stocktaking of a life.
Childhood memory
The middle stanza links the old man in Spain to the boy on the Sligo shore. Then he brought shells to an older mind and hoped for approval; now he imagines bringing his life to God. The parallel gives the poem its shape: at every age we bring what we have gathered to someone greater and wait for judgement.
Knowledge
Newton pictured himself as a boy picking up shells beside the unexplored ocean of truth. Yeats insists that his shells were real, not a metaphor. The contrast suggests a preference for direct, lived experience over abstract knowledge, and a humility about how little any mind can finally answer.
Context
Algeciras is a Spanish port on the Bay of Gibraltar, looking across the narrow Strait to Morocco. Yeats travelled in southern Spain in the late 1920s, when his health was poor, and the poem's meditation on death belongs to that period of illness and recovery. It was collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933).
Rosses Point, the seaside village near Sligo, was a place of childhood holidays for Yeats, and its shore appears in several of his poems. In The Winding Stair the poem sits near "Mohini Chatterjee" and "Byzantium", other poems in which the ageing Yeats thinks about death and what may follow it.
Form
Three six-line stanzas rhyming ABABCC. The first four lines of each have four beats; the closing couplet lengthens to five, so each stanza widens at the end, like the view across the Straits. The poem moves steadily from outer scene to memory to meditation, one stanza for each.
