What Then - Analysis

A life that succeeds—and still gets cross-examined

Yeats builds the poem around a blunt central pressure: even a life that hits every milestone can feel inadequate when judged by a deeper, less worldly standard. The speaker’s story keeps arriving at recognizably satisfying endpoints—fame, money, friends, family, mastery—yet each arrival is met by the same heckling refrain: What then? That question, voiced by Plato’s ghost, doesn’t deny the achievements; it refuses to let them count as a final answer.

School ambition and the religion of rule

The poem begins in a social atmosphere of prediction and expectation: His chosen comrades assume he will grow a famous man, and he internalizes the same prophecy. What’s striking is how quickly that hope hardens into discipline: he lived by rule, with All his twenties crammed with toil. These lines make success sound less like self-discovery than like obedience—an almost moral regimen. Plato’s ghost enters right there, as if to say: even if effort is admirable, it still doesn’t tell you what the effort is for.

The respectable prizes: being read, being solvent, being liked

In the second stanza, the rewards are unmistakably public and measurable: Everything he wrote was read, and he earns Sufficient money. Even his relationships are certified: Friends that have been friends indeed. The phrase feels like a seal of quality, as though the speaker is auditing his own life and checking each box. The repeated What then? turns that audit into a kind of courtroom scene: the evidence is strong, and yet the judge remains unconvinced.

Domestic paradise, lowered stakes—and the same haunting

The third stanza narrows from public achievement to private comfort: A small old house, wife, daughter, son, and a garden where plum and cabbage grew. Even the social world becomes gently flattering: poets and Wits about him drew. It’s an idyllic picture, almost deliberately ordinary in its details, as if the speaker wants to prove he also succeeded at being content. But Plato’s ghost doesn’t change its line; the question is the same whether the good is grand (fame) or homely (cabbage). The tension sharpens: the more complete the life seems, the more unreasonable the dissatisfaction starts to feel—and yet it won’t go away.

Perfection as a defense—and the ghost’s escalation

In the final stanza, the speaker is old and tries to rest his case: The work is done, he followed his boyish plan, and, against critics, he claims moral steadiness: I swerved in naught. He even asserts a crowning achievement: Something to perfection brought. This is the poem’s proudest moment—and it’s exactly where the haunting intensifies. The ghost sings louder, implying that the question isn’t a mild philosophical puzzle but an existential alarm. The poem’s sting is that integrity and accomplishment—not just wealth or applause—still fail to quiet the demand for a further meaning.

The uncomfortable implication of Plato

Choosing Plato is pointed: Plato suggests ideals, ultimate goods, and a scale of value that everyday success can’t satisfy. The ghost’s refrain pushes the reader to hear each stanza’s triumph as provisional, as if these are shadows of something more real. The speaker keeps answering with additions—fame, then money, then family, then perfection—but the ghost keeps asking a question that additions can’t solve.

A question that refuses to be answered by accumulation

By the end, What then? feels less like curiosity than like a verdict on a whole way of living: a life organized around plans, outcomes, and proof. The poem doesn’t tell us what the correct answer is; it shows how the speaker’s best answers are all of one type—achieved, possessed, completed—and how that type may be the problem. If the ghost is right, then the speaker’s tragedy isn’t failure at all; it’s that he succeeded exactly as intended, and discovered that intention was too small.