The Gyres
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1938. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2034, 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 2034.
It begins: The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth
In brief
SummaryAs civilisation turns towards violence, the poet chooses tragic joy.
The poem opens with a cry to the gyres, the great turning spirals of history, and to a mysterious figure, Old Rocky Face, asked to look out on the world. An age is ending: beauty and worth wear themselves out, old features are blotted out, blood stains the earth, and everything is scattered as in the philosophy of Empedocles. Like the Trojans after Hector's death, we watch our city burn, yet the watchers laugh in "tragic joy". The second stanza refuses to mourn. Whatever nightmare comes, the answer is "What matter?", and a voice from a cavern says only one word: rejoice. The last stanza looks past the coming coarseness to a time when those Rocky Face loves, lovers of horses and women, will dig up the workman, the noble and the saint from the dark, and the wheel of history will turn back towards an older order.
Lines to remember
We that look on but laugh in tragic joy.
The gyres! the gyres! Old Rocky Face, look forth;
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4The gyres turning
The poet calls out to the gyres and to Old Rocky Face, an oracle-like presence whose identity the poem never explains. Ideas held too long can no longer be thought; beauty and worth decay from within, and the "ancient lineaments", the old features of civilisation, are erased.
Lines 5 to 8Tragic joy
Blood runs without reason, and the order of things is flung apart as the Greek philosopher Empedocles described. Hector, the defender of Troy, is dead and the city is alight. Those who look on do not weep but laugh in a joy that knows the tragedy.
Lines 9 to 12What matter
The second stanza builds its refusal on the question "What matter?" Nightmare may ride on top and the sensitive body be soiled with blood and mud, yet there are to be no sighs or tears, even though a greater, more gracious time has gone.
Lines 13 to 16A voice from the cavern
He admits he once mourned the lost civilisations whose painted images and make-up boxes lie in ancient tombs, but will not do so again. A voice comes out of a cavern, like an oracle, and all it knows is a single word of rejoicing.
Lines 17 to 21Out of the dark
Conduct, work and the soul itself grow coarse. Yet those Rocky Face holds dear, lovers of horses and of women, will bring something back from a broken tomb, or from the dark haunt of the polecat and the owl, or from any rich darkness.
Lines 22 to 24The gyre again
What they will dig up is the workman, the noble and the saint, the three figures of an ordered, traditional society. Then everything will run once more on the "unfashionable gyre", the turning of history back to what the modern age has rejected.
Themes
History as cycles
The gyres are Yeats's image for the turning of history, in which each age unwinds and gives way to its opposite. The poem stands at the end of a cycle, amid blood and coarseness, but it is sure the wheel will turn. That certainty lets it face destruction without despair, looking beyond it to the return of the workman, the noble and the saint.
Tragic joy
The poem's most striking claim is that the right response to catastrophe is joy. The onlookers laugh in "tragic joy", the refrain asks "What matter?", and the cavern's one word is rejoice. This is not indifference but a heroic gaiety, the same attitude Yeats praises in "Lapis Lazuli", which follows it in New Poems.
Aristocratic values
Those whom Rocky Face loves are "Lovers of horses and of women", a picture of a passionate, reckless, landed class. The poem imagines them restoring a society of workman, noble and saint. It is a frankly aristocratic vision, hostile to the levelling modern world and hopeful of an order in which each rank has its place.
Context
The poem stands first in New Poems (1938), and so opens the last book Yeats published in his lifetime. It draws on the system he set out in A Vision (1925, revised 1937), where history turns in interlocking gyres, each age of about two thousand years ending in violence as its opposite begins. Europe in the later 1930s gave that idea a new urgency.
Empedocles, the Greek philosopher, taught that the elements are drawn together by Love and driven apart by Strife in an endless cycle, so he suits a poem about the turning of ages. Hector's death and the burning of Troy, from Homer's Iliad and the later legends of the city's fall, give the fall of a civilisation its classic image.
Form
Three stanzas of ottava rima, eight lines of iambic pentameter rhymed ABABABCC. The closing couplet of each stanza gathers the argument into a statement, most memorably the laughter at the end of the first stanza. The refrain-like "What matter?", repeated four times, gives the poem the insistence of a chant.
