Vacillation - Analysis

Running between extremes: a mind that won’t consent to one answer

Vacillation stages a lifelong argument inside one speaker: he keeps swerving between opposite claims about how to live—ascetic clarity versus human attachment, resignation versus appetite, faith versus art—and he can’t quite declare a winner. The opening frames life as a dash Between extremities, where some final combustion Comes to destroy the tidy oppositions of day and night. Yet the poem refuses to let death be the last word. It immediately asks, almost impatiently, What is joy?—as if any philosophy that explains death without explaining joy is incomplete. The tone here is bracing and analytic, but also provoked: the speaker wants an account of living that can survive the pressure of mortality.

The burning tree: a single image that won’t choose flame or leaf

Section II offers a paradox made visible: a tree that is at once glittering flame and green with moistened foliage. The poem insists, half is half and yet is all, refusing to let us treat the split as merely two halves. Flame and leaf are not enemies here; they consume what they renew. That line is crucial: the same process that destroys also refreshes, which means the speaker is searching for a model where contradiction is not failure but energy.

Between those halves hangs Attis' image, suspended between staring fury and blind lush leaf. The strange blessing is that the person there knows not grief. The poem doesn’t say he achieves certainty; it says he may know not what he knows. Joy, in this logic, may not be an answer but a condition—something like being held in the tension without being torn apart by it.

Maxims that curdle: ambition, love, and the insult of not-enough

In III the voice becomes sharper, almost satirical, as it lists worldly advice: Get all the gold and silver, Satisfy ambition, ram them with the sun. But the poem turns those maxims against themselves. The speaker observes that No man has ever lived who had enough—specifically, not enough children's gratitude or woman's love. This is a bleak and intimate diagnosis: even our most socially approved pursuits don’t fail because they’re immoral; they fail because they can’t fill the exact hunger they awaken.

Then comes a sterner pivot: Begin the preparation for your death, and from the fortieth winter onward test everything you make. Works not suited to those who come open-eyed and laughing to the tomb are called extravagance of breath. The poem admires a kind of fearless arrival at death, but the phrase extravagance of breath also sounds like self-accusation. The tension here is brutal: the speaker both longs to laugh at the tomb and suspects most of his life—work, faith, even thought—is only breath spent too lavishly.

Twenty minutes of blessing: ecstasy as evidence

Section IV is the poem’s most surprising tenderness. The speaker, in his fiftieth year, sits a solitary man in a crowded London shop with an empty cup—a scene of ordinary loneliness and fatigue. Then his body of a sudden blazed, and for twenty minutes he experiences happiness so intense he feels blessed and able to bless. This isn’t a doctrine; it’s an event. The poem lets the body be the site of revelation, and it matters that the duration is limited and counted. Joy here is not permanent enlightenment; it’s a flare that nonetheless convinces him blessing is real.

The return of weight: responsibility, conscience, vanity

The very next section undoes that radiance. Even when the world offers beauty—summer Sunlight, wintry moonlight, a sky’s Cloudy leafage—he says, I cannot look. The cause is not lack of taste but Responsibility, which weighs me down. The repetition of that phrase, and the catalog of remembered failures—things said or done, and worse, things he did not do or say—shows a mind that can’t stop auditing itself.

Notably, the poem refuses to romanticize this as pure moral seriousness. The speaker admits the recoil may come from My conscience or my vanity. That single alternative is one of the poem’s most honest knots: even remorse can be contaminated by self-regard. The ecstasy of IV doesn’t cure him; it only makes the relapse into self-weight feel more inevitable.

“Let all things pass away”: the dream of release, repeated across empires

Section VI widens the lens. A figure in a rivery field smells new-mown hay and cries, Let all things pass away. Then the scene leaps to antiquity: milk-white asses near where Babylon or Nineveh once rose; again, the same cry. The repetition makes renunciation sound like a human reflex that outlives civilizations. Even song is pulled into the question: What's the meaning of all song? and the refrain answers with disappearance.

But the poem complicates that refrain by locating its roots in man's blood-sodden heart. The desire to let go is not serene wisdom floating above history; it is born from damage. The contradiction is stark: release is presented as both the most reasonable conclusion and as a symptom of suffering. The speaker wants to be done with everything, yet he can’t pretend that wanting-to-be-done is innocent.

Fire versus theme: the Soul and the Heart refuse each other’s solutions

In VII the inner debate becomes literal dialogue. The Soul commands: Seek out reality, leave things that seem. The Heart panics about artistic emptiness: lack a theme? The Soul offers pure purification—Isaiah's coal—and the Heart answers with the cost: Struck dumb. The Soul calls the fire salvation; the Heart insists that even Homer’s greatness came from original sin, from the messy, fallen material of human life.

This is the poem’s central vacillation in miniature. If you accept the Soul’s fire, you may gain clarity and lose speech; if you accept the Heart’s theme, you may gain song and remain implicated. The poem refuses to decide because both outcomes look like amputations.

Von Hügel and the undecayed saint: refusing comfort that comes “welcome in the tomb”

Section VIII brings the conflict into a charged encounter with religious miracle. The speaker addresses Von Hugel and mentions Saint Teresa’s body undecayed, sweet odours, Healing. These details tempt him with a faith that offers palpable consolation. Yet he distrusts the motive: choosing belief because it is most welcome in the tomb would be a pre-destined part, a role adopted for relief rather than truth.

Against that, he names his allegiance: Homer is my example and his unchristened heart. It’s not that the speaker hates sanctity; he says he honour it. The refusal is subtler: he won’t buy certainty at the price of narrowing the human field that makes art possible. The ending, get you gone, carries both affection (blessings) and a hard boundary. The poem finishes not with peace but with a chosen unrest.

A sharpened question the poem won’t let go of

If the refrain Let all things pass away rises from a blood-sodden heart, then what would it mean to pass things away without turning that pain into a philosophy? The poem seems to fear that even its noblest renunciations might be elaborate ways of defending the self against disappointment, aging, and the humiliations of needing love.