Old Tom Again - Analysis

A prophecy against the cult of perfection

The poem speaks in a brief, oracular burst, and its central insistence is blunt: what we call perfection does not last, and it does not need to. The opening claim, Things out of perfection sail, imagines perfection not as a secure destination but as a harbor that can’t hold anything. Even the most complete, most beautifully made thing is pictured leaving—moving away from the very standard that crowned it. That initial image sets the tone: not mournful exactly, but firm, almost impatient with anyone who expects stability from the perfected.

The full sails: grandeur that is already departure

Yeats makes the departure feel triumphant rather than tragic: all their swelling canvas wear. The “swelling canvas” suggests a ship leaning into wind, powered up, confident. That matters: the poem doesn’t say things break down or decay; it says they sail. Perfection, then, is not ruined by time so much as outgrown. The image holds a tension—because “swelling canvas” is also a sign of exposure. Big sails catch the wind, but they also catch storms. The poem’s world is one where splendor and risk are inseparable: the more fully something exists, the more it is pushed onward, into weather.

Nor shall the self-begotten fail: a stubborn kind of creation

The poem’s turn comes with its defiant promise: Nor shall the self-begotten fail. “Self-begotten” implies something that generates itself—an idea, an art, a spiritual force, or a personality that doesn’t rely on external approval. Against the first couplet’s image of inevitable leaving, this line sounds like an answer: yes, things sail out of perfection, but that doesn’t mean they collapse. Instead, something self-creating persists. The tone here is almost argumentative, as if the speaker is correcting a common mistake: don’t confuse leaving perfection with failing.

The poem’s target: fantastic men and their false explanations

Yeats sharpens the conflict by naming the doubters: fantastic men suppose. “Fantastic” can mean imaginative, but it also carries a hint of delusion—men who build elaborate theories. What do they “suppose”? The poem answers with a strange list: Building-yard and stormy shore. These are places of making and unmaking: the yard where ships are constructed, and the shore where they may be wrecked. The “fantastic men” want a neat story that starts in manufacture and ends in disaster, as if every departure from perfection must be explained by a blueprint or a catastrophe. Yeats resists that tidy chain of causality. His voice suggests: you’re mistaking the visible settings—where things are built, where they break—for the deeper force that moves them.

Between birth and burial: winding-sheet and swaddling-clothes

The final pair of images is the poem’s most unsettling compression: winding-sheet and swaddling - clothes. A winding-sheet wraps a corpse; swaddling clothes wrap an infant. By placing them together, Yeats folds the whole human cycle into a single breath. It’s not only that life contains both; it’s that the categories blur. The same “cloth” idea can cover beginnings and endings, and the dash in swaddling - clothes feels like a small hitch in speech—a reminder that we’re forcing language to hold incompatible truths. Here the poem’s contradiction becomes unavoidable: departure can look like death, and yet be a kind of birth. Sailing “out of perfection” may resemble ruin to onlookers, but it may also be the necessary wrapping of a new life.

A harder question hidden in the cloth

If the same fabric can serve as winding-sheet and swaddling, what exactly are the “fantastic men” defending when they cling to perfection? Perhaps perfection is their way of keeping the dead from looking like the newborn—of insisting that endings are merely failures, not transformations. Yeats’s refusal to grant them that comfort is the poem’s coldest, clearest courage.