WB Yeats

No Second Troy (1916)

four questions in three quatrains

Why...? What...? Why, what...? Was there...?

all rhetorical, closed off, the last one close off by the title

(Was there another Troy.../No Second Troy)

Three of the four are in the final quatrain, the most questioning quatrain. The first quatrain is an unfinished question, the second quatrain is an end and a beginning of two questions, the third quatrain is the end of a question plus two further full questions.

Yeats exploits the English question structure, the question word at the beginning and the question mark at the end, also the implicit speech instruction in a question, that the pitch lifts at the end.

A question word demands in a reader a tighter gathering of language so that the questioning inflection is carried to the mark, the end of each clause must hover, as in any long sentence, but the relationship between beginning and end of a question is stronger than in a standard sentence.

In these long questions the question word controls the sense.

The first question begins

Why should I blame her that she filled my days with misery

Colloquially, the question 'Why should I?' is familiar. There are also gramatically full questions in 'Why should I blame her?' and 'Why should I blame her that she filled my days?', where the line breaks, leaning the sense over.

The word 'blame' splits the sense, as it is used both as a simple transitive verb from I-subject to her-object, and in the phrasal verb 'to blame that'. Here 'that' is a useful tool as it easily hinges the two clauses before allowing a double hinge of possibilities both branching from 'Why'. The conjuction OR is used to strengthen these hinging clauses, and functions alone when one of the possibilities splits in two:

(have taught.../or/hurled...)

When the question mark comes it is on the end of a subclause attached to one of these options, themselves branching from the double hinge stemming from the initial question word. This subclause also seems somewhat quotational, as if the mind of the speaker has wandered into the mind of his object. The one-line ideo-space of this subclause having hijacked the question mark is externalised to form the second question, the first and second quatrains' only strong stress rhyme (desire/fire) chiming with this semiotic leap.

This second question seems more contrived in its extension, a complex parallel here presented in two columns:

What - nobleness
made - made
her - a mind (hers - here connected to her with 'with')
peaceful - simple ('as a fire')

'What...?' is a different kind of question word, one that is a pseudo-tangible grammatical subject, an absent subject, here something that 'could make'. The poet unashamedly makes a semantic rule out of a grammatical construction, and finds something else that 'makes' - what does it make? Oh, the quality that we have observed in 'her' in the opening line of the quatrain, now defined in its third line. And what is it? Nobleness. Yeats exposes his backtracking artifice, the desire/fire rhyme hitting home the poem's construction (its 'making'). And it is a simile! There follows another: as... like... a kind... before we swing out of courtly poetry and return to earth with the one sentence prosaic line:

That is not natural in an age like this.

'an age like this' echoes and breaks the simile construction, and 'That is not' introduces the rational tone of the final quatrain, obsessed with the verb 'to be': 'is not... being... being... is...' until the final question is 'Was?'

(Post script - I will never be able to read this poem without hearing Sinéad O'Connor's 'Troy')