Three Movements

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: Shakespearean fish swam the sea, far away from land

In brief

Summary

Three ages of literature pictured as fish: free, netted, and stranded.

Three lines sum up three ages of literature as three kinds of fish. The Shakespearean fish swam the open sea, far from land, free and wild. The Romantic fish swam in nets that drew them towards the hand, still alive but caught. The third line asks what all the fish are that now lie gasping on the beach, and leaves the modern age to recognise itself in them.

Lines to remember

What are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?

Line by line

Lines 1 to 3Sea, net and strand
Each line is one movement. The fish of Shakespeare's age range freely, those of the Romantic age come willingly into the poet's net, and the fish of the present are stranded and dying. The question in the last line is really a verdict on modern writing, and perhaps on Yeats's own generation.

Themes

Literary history

The poem compresses three centuries into three images. Shakespeare's imagination roams the whole world; the Romantics draw their subjects closer to the self; the moderns, out of their element, can only gasp. The movement from sea to net to shore is a movement from freedom to capture to exhaustion.

Decline

Like "The Nineteenth Century and After", which comes shortly before it in the book, the poem sees the present as an age that comes after greatness. Here the tone is harsher: instead of the delight of pebbles on the shore there are fish dying on the strand, a comic but grim picture.

Context

The poem was collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933), among a group of very short poems that includes "Spilt Milk", "The Nineteenth Century and After" and "Statistics". Together they read like a notebook of an ageing poet's judgments on his time, each compressed into a few lines.

Form

Three long lines of about six beats, all rhyming on the same sound, "land", "hand" and "strand". The single repeated rhyme binds the three ages together, and the switch from statements to a question in the last line mirrors the loss of direction the poem describes.