Symbols - Analysis

A little emblem of Yeats’s harsh marriage: time, violence, and ornament

This brief poem reads like a row of objects placed on a table for inspection, and its central claim is bleak: the things that look like culture and beauty are stitched directly onto the instruments of ruin. Yeats doesn’t argue this by explanation; he does it by pairing images that refuse to stay separate—sanctity with machinery, heroism with stupidity, elegance with slaughter.

The watch-tower and the blind timekeeper

The opening couplet gives us a world already weathered: a storm-beaten old watch-tower suggests vigilance that has outlasted its purpose, as if history keeps standing even when meaning has eroded. Then the poem inserts a figure of spiritual withdrawal who oddly performs a public, mechanical duty: A blind hermit rings the hour. The hermit’s blindness matters because he announces time without seeing what time contains. It’s a chilling kind of caretaking—keeping the schedule of a world you can’t or won’t look at.

The sword that destroys, and the fool who carries it

The next emblem is even more direct: an All-destroying sword-blade is still being borne along, not by a warrior with a cause but by the wandering fool. The tension here is pointed: the most consequential force in the poem is entrusted to the least trustworthy person. The word still makes it feel cyclical, almost resigned—destruction persists, and it keeps finding hands, even foolish ones, to transport it onward.

Gold-sewn silk: beauty as decoration on damage

The final couplet tightens the knot: Gold-sewn silk on the sword-blade yokes luxury to violence so closely that the beautiful fabric becomes a kind of accomplice. When the poem ends with Beauty and fool together laid, it doesn’t sound like reconciliation; it sounds like an entombment or a verdict. Beauty is not set against folly to redeem it—beauty is placed beside it, as if the world’s finest surfaces are what help the blade keep moving through history.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the hermit can ring the hour without seeing, and the fool can carry the sword without understanding, who in this world is meant to be responsible? The poem’s most unsettling suggestion is that symbolic roles replace moral agency: everyone performs an emblem, and the blade remains all-destroying anyway.