Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors
Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors - meaning Summary
Quiet Influence Remembered
Yeats offers a brief, grateful meditation on the unseen teachers whose efforts quietly shape the world. The poem states that what these instructors set out to do they accomplished, then likens existence to a drop of dew balanced on a blade of grass. It emphasizes successful, modest influence and the fragile, transient condition of life that their work helps sustain and illuminate.
Read Complete AnalysesWhat they undertook to do They brought to pass; All things hang like a drop of dew Upon a blade of grass.
This is really one of the very great poems, not everyone will see that—I saw it with a low rating somewhere: "I could write that," sort of thing I presume. But it sits as a hamster’s bait, soundly in the future. See also, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Grey, Stanza 14 (⌘/Ctrl+F: “full”).