Meru
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1934. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2030, 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 2030.
It begins: Civilisation is hooped together, brought
In brief
SummaryCivilisations are illusions that man's restless thought must tear down.
A sonnet on the collapse of civilisations. Civilisation, Yeats says, is held together like a barrel by hoops, kept under rule and a show of peace by a mass of illusions. But human life is thought, and thought cannot rest: in spite of his terror, man goes on ravening and uprooting down the centuries until he reaches the desolation of reality. Egypt, Greece and Rome are waved away. The last six lines turn to hermits on Mount Meru or Everest, naked in the snow and the winter blast, who know that day brings on night and that before dawn man's glory and monuments are gone.
Lines to remember
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Hooped together
Civilisation is bound like a barrel, brought under rule and the appearance of peace by many illusions. Then the turn: man's life is thought, and despite his terror he cannot stop. The long sentence runs on across the line endings, as restless as the mind it describes.
Lines 5 to 8Good-bye, Rome
Thought goes on ravening, raging and uprooting century after century, so that man may come at last into the "desolation of reality", the bare truth behind the illusions. The eighth line bids farewell to Egypt, Greece and Rome in one breezy sentence, as if great empires were guests leaving a party.
Lines 9 to 14Hermits in the snow
The poem moves to hermits on Mount Meru or Everest, sheltering in caves under drifted snow or exposed naked to the winter wind. They know what the rest of us forget: day brings round the night, and before dawn all of man's glory and monuments are gone. The closing couplet is calm, not tragic.
Themes
Illusion and reality
Civilisation in the opening lines is a useful fiction, held together by "manifold illusion". Human thought keeps stripping these illusions away, and what it finds is not comfort but desolation. The poem does not mourn this. Reaching reality, however bleak, is presented as the destiny of the thinking mind.
Rise and fall
Egypt, Greece and Rome are dismissed in a single line, and every civilisation's glory and monuments will vanish in its turn. Like much of Yeats's late work, the poem sees history as cycles of building and destruction, with day always bringing round the night.
Contemplation
The hermits of the sestet stand apart from history. Naked in the snow on the world's highest mountains, they have given up everything the civilisations built. Their knowledge is the poem's answer to the ravening mind: to see the cycle clearly and accept it.
Context
"Meru" closes the Supernatural Songs, a sequence first collected in The King of the Great Clock Tower (Cuala Press, 1934) and then in A Full Moon in March (Macmillan, 1935). After the songs of the hermit Ribh and the brief riddles on history and the soul, it ends the sequence on a vision of all civilisations passing.
Mount Meru is the sacred mountain at the centre of the world in Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. In the 1930s Yeats was working closely with the Indian teacher Shri Purohit Swami, and Indian thought on renunciation and the cycles of the ages seems to lie behind the poem's hermits.
Form
A sonnet in the Shakespearean pattern, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, with some half rhymes (century and reality, Everest and blast). The lines are long and heavily run on in the first eight, then steadier in the last six, so the restless raging of thought gives way to the stillness of the mountain.
