The Dawn - Analysis

A vow to see without keeping score

The poem’s central insistence is blunt: the speaker wants a kind of innocence so complete it borders on refusal—to be ignorant as the dawn. But this isn’t ignorance as stupidity; it’s ignorance as freedom from the human itch to measure, explain, and record. The dawn, in Yeats’s imagining, witnesses everything and understands nothing in the accountant’s sense. It arrives, looks, and moves on. The speaker envies that unburdened vision—seeing without turning the seen into a conclusion.

The queen’s brooch: power made tiny

The first example of what dawn has “looked down” on is oddly intimate: that old queen measuring a town / With the pin of a brooch. An entire town is reduced to the reach of a piece of jewelry; sovereign power becomes a gesture of miniature control. Dawn’s indifference matters here. It does not admire the queen’s authority or condemn it—it simply shines while the queen pretends the world can be managed by a sharp point and a private calculation. By choosing this image, the speaker hints that knowledge and power often share the same fantasy: that reality can be made small enough to hold.

Babylon’s sums against the “careless planets”

The poem then widens from courtly power to scholarly certainty: withered men in a pedantic Babylon watch careless planets and notice The stars fade out where the moon comes, then took their tablets and did sums. The phrase pedantic Babylon makes the learning feel proud and brittle—an empire of explanation built against the sky’s indifference. Calling the planets careless is crucial: the universe will not cooperate with the seriousness of human record-keeping. Dawn sees the same sky event—stars dimming at moonrise—but refuses to translate it into mastery.

The glittering coach: dawn as pure spectacle

After queens and calculators, the poem offers a third figure: dawn as a presence that merely stood, rocking the glittering coach / Above the cloudy shoulders of the horses. This image feels mythic, almost theatrical—a coach poised on clouds, horses with “shoulders,” a slow rocking motion. The key word is merely. Dawn doesn’t interpret; it stages. In that staging, beauty becomes an argument against explanation. The speaker isn’t asking to know less about the world so much as to live closer to what the world does—arrive, glow, move.

The turn: contempt for knowledge, hunger for wantonness

The poem’s emotional pivot is the dash-spliced confession: I would be -- for no knowledge is worth a straw --. This isn’t mild skepticism; it’s open contempt, as if the speaker has been hurt or disappointed by knowing. The final line pushes the desire past innocence into appetite: Ignorant and wanton as the dawn. Wanton adds a provocative charge—unruly, sensual, unashamed. Dawn becomes a model not just for unknowing but for uninhibited being: touching everything with light and asking permission from no one.

A chosen ignorance that still knows what it’s refusing

There’s a tension the poem never resolves: the speaker’s wish is deliberate and articulate, but what he longs for is a state beyond deliberation. To say I would be ignorant is already to stand on the far side of knowledge, judging it. That contradiction gives the poem its bite. The speaker can’t actually become dawn—but he can declare war on the habits the queen and the Babylonian scholars represent: the habit of reducing a town to a brooch-pin, the habit of turning the heavens into sums. What he reaches for instead is a fierce, almost scandalous simplicity: to be present like morning light, and to let that be enough.