What Then?
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: His chosen comrades thought at school
In brief
SummaryA successful life is questioned, stanza by stanza, by Plato's ghost.
A brief life story told in the third person, and plainly close to Yeats's own. At school his friends thought he would be famous; he thought so too and worked hard through his twenties. Everything he wrote was read, he earned enough money, and he kept true friends. His happier dreams came true: a small old house, a wife, a daughter and a son, a garden, poets and wits around him. At the end he looks back, satisfied that he kept to his boyhood plan and brought something to perfection. But after every stage the ghost of Plato sings the same question, and at the close it sings louder.
Lines to remember
'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?'
Line by line
Lines 1 to 5Promise at school
His chosen friends at school believed he would become a famous man. He agreed, lived by strict rule and crammed his twenties with toil. Then comes the first interruption: Plato's ghost asks what then.
Lines 6 to 10Success and friends
Everything he wrote was read. After some years he earned enough money for his needs and kept friends who proved true. The achievements are modest and real, and the ghost asks its question again.
Lines 11 to 15Dreams come true
His happier dreams come true: a small old house, wife, daughter and son, a garden of plums and cabbages, poets and wits drawn about him. It is a picture of a full, settled life, and still the ghost is not satisfied.
Lines 16 to 20The work is done
Grown old, he thinks his work complete, done according to his boyish plan. Let the fools rage: he never swerved and brought something to perfection. But this time the ghost sings its question louder, and the poem stops there.
Themes
Achievement and its worth
The poem lists everything a man could hope for: fame, money, friendship, family, a home, finished work. Each stanza builds it up, and the refrain calmly knocks it down. Worldly success, however complete, does not answer the deepest question of what life is for.
Philosophy and the self
Plato taught that the world of the senses is a shadow of eternal truth. His ghost stands for that higher standard, from which even a perfect career looks small. That it grows louder as the man grows old suggests the question presses hardest at the end of life.
Context
First published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938). The details match Yeats's own life closely: early ambition, fame, his marriage to George Hyde Lees in 1917, his daughter Anne and son Michael. The small old house with its garden may be Riversdale in Rathfarnham, his last Irish home, which he leased from 1932, though the poem does not name it.
In his final years Yeats often reviewed his life and work, as in "The Circus Animals' Desertion" and "The Municipal Gallery Revisited". This poem does so with a rueful, almost comic humility: it grants the life its successes, then lets a single repeated question from the ancient philosopher empty them of certainty.
Form
Four five-line stanzas of four-beat lines. The first, third and fourth lines rhyme (often loosely, as "school" and "toil"), and the second line rhymes or half rhymes with the refrain. The refrain changes only once, in the last line, where "louder" makes the unanswered question ring out.
