Fragments
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1933. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2029, 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 2029.
It begins: Locke sank into a swoon
In brief
SummaryTwo riddling fragments on modern reason and where true wisdom comes from.
Two short numbered fragments. The first is a satirical creation myth of the modern world: the philosopher John Locke sank into a swoon, the Garden of Eden died, and God took the spinning-jenny, the machine of the Industrial Revolution, out of his side, as He once took Eve from Adam's. The mechanical age is born from abstract reason. The second asks where that truth came from and answers with a chant: out of a medium's mouth, out of nothing, out of the forest soil, out of the dark night where the crowns of ancient Nineveh lie buried. For Yeats, wisdom rises from the irrational and the buried past, not from reason.
Lines to remember
Locke sank into a swoon;
God took the spinning-jenny
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Locke's swoon
A mock creation story. Locke, the philosopher of reason and sense experience, faints; the Garden dies; and God takes the spinning-jenny out of his side, as He took Eve from the sleeping Adam in Genesis. Modern industry is born from abstract thought, and paradise is lost to the machine.
Lines 5 to 10Out of dark night
The second fragment asks where that truth came from. The answer repeats "Out of" four times: from a medium in a trance, from nothing, from the forest loam, and from the dark night where the crowns of Nineveh lie. Insight rises from the unconscious, from nature and from the ancient dead.
Themes
Reason and the machine
Part I blames the modern world on a certain kind of thinking. Locke stands for cold, mechanical reason; when it takes over, the Garden, the old living, spiritual world, dies, and the machine is born in its place. The biblical parody makes the point with wit: industry is the Eve of a fallen, rational Adam.
Sources of wisdom
Part II rejects reason as the source of its own truth. The insight comes from a medium, from nothing, from the forest floor and from buried empires. Yeats trusted trance, dream, nature and history over argument, and the chant-like repetition of "Out of" makes the answer sound like a spell rather than a proof.
History and ruin
Nineveh, the great Assyrian capital, was destroyed and buried for centuries. Its crowns lying in dark night suggest that every civilisation falls, and that its wisdom survives underground, waiting to be recovered. The modern mechanical age of part I may be just another passing empire.
Context
The poem was not in The Tower when that book appeared in 1928. Yeats added it to The Tower section of his Collected Poems (Macmillan, 1933), placing it among poems about history, faith and the end of an age such as "Two Songs from a Play" and "Leda and the Swan".
Yeats disliked the mechanical philosophy he associated with Locke and Newton, which he believed had drained the world of spirit; he took the attack partly from William Blake. The medium of part II reflects his long interest in seances and spiritualism, and in the automatic writing of his wife, George, which fed his book A Vision.
Form
Two numbered fragments of four and six short lines, mostly of three beats. Part I rhymes its second and fourth lines like a ballad stanza; part II runs in half-rhymed couplets ("came" and "loam"). Part I has the compressed shape of a myth or proverb, while part II's repeated "Out of" works like an incantation.
