Rhetorical Questions
"No Second Troy" is structured around four different rhetorical questions. These are questions the poet does not need or intend to answer. He probably already knows the answers. It's like when you...
Ancient Greece
Yeats had a very mythological and historical mind. He thought that history moved in cycles from more orderly to more chaotic periods. In poems like "The Second Coming," he expressed his belief that...
Class Conflict
Yeats was a conservative who valued order and tradition. Maud Gonne was a radical who grew out of the traditional Irish society he loved. He's like, "You're one of us! You should know better than t...