Spilt Milk

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1933from The Winding Stair and Other Poems

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: We that have done and thought

In brief

Summary

People who have lived by action and thought end by spreading thin.

A four-line poem about what becomes of people who have lived full lives. The speaker talks for a group that includes himself: those who have acted and then reflected, reflected and then acted again. Their end is not a climax but a slow dispersal. They wander in their talk and grow thinner, like milk spilt on a stone, which cannot soak in and cannot be gathered back up, so it simply spreads until it is gone.

Lines to remember

Like milk spilt on a stone.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 4Milk on a stone
The first two lines swing from doing to thinking and back again, as if a whole life has been balanced between deeds and reflection. The last two say where that balance ends: in rambling and thinning out. The title calls up the proverb about crying over spilt milk, a loss that cannot be undone.

Themes

Ageing

The poem is a small study of age. People who have spent their strength on deeds and ideas do not end in a grand final act; they lose their shape, like a liquid spreading across a hard surface. The first-person plural is inclusive. Yeats, by then in his sixties, counts himself among them, and the tone is rueful rather than tragic.

Action and thought

The mirrored opening lines, doing and thinking, thinking and doing, suggest a life held in balance between the active and the reflective. Neither saves the speaker from dispersal. The poem sets that neat, symmetrical pattern against the shapeless spill of the last line, so the form itself shows order giving way.

Context

The poem was collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). It sits among a run of very short poems in that book, with "The Nineteenth Century and After", "Statistics" and "Three Movements", each a single sharp thought about age, history or art set down in a few lines.

Form

Four short lines of about three beats, rhymed ABAB on near-rhymes: "thought" with "out", "done" with "stone". The first two lines mirror each other, giving a sense of balance, and the looser third line breaks that pattern just as the sense turns to rambling.