What Then? - By W B Yeats

What Then?

HIS chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man; [run on line; enjambment – together with commas and semicolons]
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?' [use of italicized sections to indicate stream of consciousness]

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. ' What then?'[ Repetition and rhetorical question]

All his happier dreams came true --
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
poets and Wits about him drew; [visual image – prosperity]
'What then.?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?'

‘The work is done,' grown old he thought,
'According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought'; [use of direct quotations – gives a sense of immediacy]
But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?'    

Analysis:

 “What then?” is a narrative poem composed by the Modernist Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The poem has four stanzas; each stanza has five lines. The rhyming pattern of the poem is abaac deddc fgffc hihhc jkjjc. The main theme of “What then?” is the insatiable human desire for perfection. In the poem the reader is given biography of a man. The reader gets to read the aims/dreams this man had during four stages of his life.

In the first stanza we meet a student who aims to get good results and become famous – both he and his friends believe this was possible for him and he makes this dream come true by toiling hard and cramming. In the second stanza we meet the young man as a successful writer: “Everything he wrote was read”. Not only that, he becomes financially successful: “After certain years he won/ Sufficient money for his need”. He also has acquired “Friends that have been friends indeed.” In the third stanza we meet the man as a mature person who had achieved all his dreams:

All his happier dreams came true --
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
poets and Wits about him drew

In the last stanza, we meet an old man who is very satisfied with his life and sees no reason to change the course of his life:

‘The work is done,' grown old he thought,
'According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought'

However, in the end of each stanza we hear a voice – the inner voice of the man – asking the man what else he could achieve. Together with the series of challenges the man overcomes, the repeated last line of each stanza successfully illustrates our inability to be satisfied by the fulfillment of any of our dreams.

The poet makes use of several techniques to illustrate his message. Visual images are the most commonly used technique in this poem. In the first stanza we see an image of a student cramming for his exams – as students this is an image we can relate to very easily. Another memorable visual image comes in the third stanza where the poet gives a list of the man’s possessions: “A small old house, wife, son/ Grounds where plums and cabbage grew”. There are many run-on lines in the poem signalling the life of the man as a continuum: the entire poem is about a series of incidents in a single man’s life. However, the man in this poem is a representative figure. He represents the entire human race. Still, the most successful technique used by the poet is the use of repeated rhetorical questions that appear as the last line of each stanza, 'What then?' Though the question is for the man in the poem, each time we read the question we also ask ourselves the same question and come to realize that we too have insatiable desires.