Statistics
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: 'Those Platonists are a curse,' he said
In brief
SummaryA grumbler blames the Platonists for a world reduced to diagrams.
A four-line joke with a sting. An unnamed man complains that the Platonists are to blame for everything. Divine fire is dying out, a diagram has been hung up where it used to burn, and more women are being born than men. The last item gives the game away: the man attacking abstract thinking ends his complaint with a statistic, exactly the kind of dry, measured fact he seems to deplore. The title makes the irony plain.
Lines to remember
'Those Platonists are a curse,' he said,
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4A curse on Platonists
The speaker reports another man's outburst in quotation marks. His charge sheet moves from the sacred to the statistical: God's fire waning, a mere chart in its place, and a count of births. Whether the Platonists are really to blame, or the complainer is the real modern, the poem leaves the reader to decide.
Themes
Spirit and measurement
The poem sets "God's fire", a living presence, against a diagram, a flat abstraction that has replaced it. It is the same complaint Yeats makes elsewhere against a rational, measuring age. The comedy is that the grumbler cannot escape the habit he attacks, and his final grievance comes as a figure from the census.
Irony
Much depends on who the speaker of the complaint is and how far the poem agrees with him. By putting the words in someone else's mouth, Yeats lets the complaint stand while also mocking it. The title, "Statistics", sides with the last line rather than the first, so the poem ends up laughing at its own speaker.
Context
The poem was collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933), in a group of very short poems that includes "Spilt Milk" and "Three Movements". Its hostility to a levelling, calculating modern spirit connects it with "The Seven Sages", which follows shortly after in the book and blames that spirit on what it calls Whiggery.
Form
Four lines rhymed ABAB, alternating longer and shorter lines, with a near-rhyme on "wane" and "men". The whole poem is one quoted speech, so it reads like an overheard remark, and its list of grievances grows odder with each line until the anticlimax of the last.