The poem is cut in my book, and I’m not sure why (Yeats 92-93). Like the poem were insignificant, and it was destined to be cut into two halves. Broken in the middle of the stanza. It is a declaration of the writer’s doubt. Just doubt. The poem can be read in several dozen ways, all of them syntactically accurate. The last line can be an appositive of “Animate”, meaning Yeats is critiquing religion. It can be a stand alone, stream of consciousness declaration of God’s existence, that only God is Animate, and human beings are an “Inanimate Phantasy.” What is known here, is that the author is standing over a dying man. Maybe the man’s soul is animate, but the cause of the war, mankind itself, is inanimate. Yet, the capitalization of “One” does seem to imply God. Though, it could be that Yeats is making the soul eternal by capitalizing the word.
Whichever one interprets it, the whole poem expresses deep doubt. If the thought is read, without interpolation, just as an expressed thought, there seems to be doubt in totality. No conclusion being reached. Not just doubt in God’s existence, but doubt that God doesn’t exist. Simple, profound, doubt. As the Cantonym in the text doesn’t allow it to be read any other way. The Antinomy of something being at once “Animate” and “Inanimate” is one interpretation. Yet, also, separating the two into animate and inanimate—the innate desire for there to be a God is animate, but the values of Mankind, which they fight over, is inanimate. It could express doubt over the religious wars in Ireland. It could express doubt in idealism, patriotism, God…
All the poem is, is doubt. A man is dying. His artery is hemorrhaging. Whether there is or is not a God is not important to the poem. The poem is simply expressing the doubts, which are meditations in wartime. As it is, when death is so close, a man lays to bear all philosophical notions, and rather tends to the immediate realization that human beings are mortal.
An interpolation into the poem might say, “He is affirming that there is not a God.” Very well, one could read it this way. But, why then include the antinomy between animate and inanimate? Belief in God is both animate and inanimate? Possibly. Though, I don’t think that is what the author is saying, otherwise there would be several dozen clearer ways of expressing it.
If read in its totality, the poem is simply doubt. There is no other theme, and this doubt is central to Yeats’ writing. Being confronted by war, idealism, crystalized versions of ideologies that sway people to fight one another, it can only inspire doubt. Nobody in combat, with a brethren dying, sees it in themselves to say, “Death is the end of this man.” Frankly, he does not know. He neither knows enough to say, “God is God is good to save this man.”
We Christians often get a bad wrap in this world for being totally sure, often at inappropriate times. When confronted with this scenario, it is cold not to doubt. One might, also, read the poem as a staggering declaration of belief in God; because if the last line is read as a parallelism and not an appositive, the entire poem becomes a cantonym. From the cantonym one is left with struggling against Negative Capability, or rather, if the poet were very clever—and Yeats is—a synergy between the two bold assertions. That being doubt. Which neither vulgar assertion can be totally accurate; therefore, neither can be expressed in totality; the work is simply the author’s doubt while gazing upon the wounded on a battlefield.
Yeats, William Butler. William Butler Yeats Selected Poems and Four Plays. Scribner Paperback Poetry, 1996.
B. K. Neifert 