SOURCE: "Yeats' Metaphors of Permanence," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1959, pp. 12-20.

In the following excerpt, Raines examines Yeats's later poems and arques that they contain metaphors which represent order amid chaos and which consequently unify Yeats's later work.

One of the constant themes in modern poetry, the search for permanence, grows primarily out of the idea that the twentieth century is a time of utter chaos and continual disruption, both spiritual and material, or, as Yeats describes it in a note to his poem "The Second Coming," "our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization." Yeats, as a modern poet, is primarily concerned with the need to synthesize chaotic and disruptive elements in our civilization with permanent elements toward the end of attaining perfection, and, therefore, order. Certain metaphors of the later poems reveal Yeats' ideas of permanence. Further, these metaphors form a unifying theme throughout a body...