The Results of Thought
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: Acquaintance; companion
In brief
SummaryAn old poet summons back, by thought, the friends that time ruined.
Yeats looks at people he has known, an acquaintance, a companion, one dear and brilliant woman, the most gifted of all, and sees them undone by their own youth and wrecked by its bitter glory. But after long years of toil he has reached a thought so deep that he can call back their healthy strength. The last stanza shows the result: images of these people rising before him, some turning dully away, some shifting the burden of time and straightening their aged knees, hesitating, shaking or nodding their heads.
Lines to remember
Bitter glory wrecked.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6Wrecked by youth
The list moves from the distant to the close: acquaintance, companion, one dear brilliant woman, the best and chosen. All were undone by their youth, ruined by an "inhuman" and bitter glory. Youth's passion, which should have been their gift, destroyed them.
Lines 7 to 12Straightening the wreck
Against this ruin the poet sets his own work. He has straightened out the wreck and wrack, toiling long years until he reached a thought deep enough to summon their wholesome strength back. The claim is bold: the mind can undo what time has done.
Lines 13 to 18The images return
The answer comes as a crowd of images, uncertain and alive. Some turn away dull-eyed; others shift "Time's filthy load" and straighten their old knees; some hesitate or stay. The poem ends on a question, heads shaking or nodding, as if they might accept the summons or refuse it.
Themes
Ruin and ageing
The friends were wrecked not by age but by youth, by a "Bitter glory" that consumed them. Age appears in the last stanza as a burden, "Time's filthy load", on bent knees. Between the two, the poem measures what the years have cost the people he loved.
The power of thought
The title promises results, and the middle stanza states the claim that years of thinking can restore lost strength. Yet the images that answer are not wholly obedient: some turn away. Thought can summon the dead or the damaged, but not command them, and the poem's ending stays open.
Context
Collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933), in the main part of the book before the "Words for Music Perhaps" songs. The volume is full of poems about memory, friendship and old age, written as many of the people of Yeats's youth were dying or had died. The poem does not name the friends it summons, and it is best read without fixing them to particular people.
Form
Three six-line stanzas of short lines, mostly three beats, rhyming ABCABC (with half rhymes such as "out" and "thought"). The wide spacing of the rhymes makes each stanza feel knotted and deliberate. The first stanza is a single breathless list; the last is a string of questions.
