Old Tom again
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: Things out of perfection sail
In brief
SummaryMad old Tom insists that true things are never born and never die.
A six-line riddle spoken in the voice of Tom the Lunatic. Things come sailing out of perfection under full canvas, like ships from a harbour with no shipyard. What is "self-begotten", made of itself, will not fail. Only foolish, fanciful people imagine that such things have a beginning and an end: a building-yard and a wreck on a stormy shore, a baby's swaddling-clothes and a corpse's winding-sheet. Tom's madness sees past birth and death to something permanent.
Lines to remember
Things out of perfection sail,
Line by line
Lines 1 to 3Out of perfection
Things sail out of perfection wearing all their swelling sails, and the self-begotten will not fail. The ship image suggests souls or forms launched from an ideal world, whole and confident, with no one having built them.
Lines 4 to 6Fantastic men
Fanciful men suppose otherwise. They imagine a building-yard where the ship was made and a stormy shore where it is wrecked, just as they imagine birth clothes and a burial shroud. Tom dismisses both beginnings and endings as illusions.
Themes
Beyond birth and death
Tom's claim is that what truly exists was never made and cannot perish. The paired images in the last two lines, shipyard and shore, swaddling-clothes and winding-sheet, set birth and death side by side as equally mistaken ideas. The thought echoes Yeats's reading in Platonic philosophy, where the soul comes from and returns to an eternal source.
Wisdom of the mad
The speaker is a lunatic, yet he has the confident last word, and it is the sane "fantastic men" who are deceived. Like Crazy Jane in the same sequence, Tom is an outsider whose madness frees him to see what ordinary people cannot.
Context
The poem belongs to "Words for Music Perhaps", first collected in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Cuala Press, 1932) and then in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). It is the last of three poems about Tom the Lunatic, after "Tom the Lunatic" and "Tom at Cruachan", and it follows "The Dancer at Cruachan and Cro-Patrick", which also finds the divine in all created things.
Form
Six lines of four beats, rhyming ABACBC: "sail" and "fail", "wear" and "shore" as a near-rhyme, "suppose" and "clothes". The compact form suits a riddle or oracle. The last two lines are built from matched pairs of compound nouns, which gives the ending a proverb-like finality.