Ithaca Reads Things Fall Apart

Introduction

Events

Cornell New Student Reading Project

Cornell Study Questions

Booklist

Online Resources for Book Discussion Groups

Essay Contest

Credits

Chinua Achebe took the title of Things Fall Apart from a line in William Butler Yeats' poem, The Second Coming. The poem was written in 1919, just after World War I and the beginning of communism and fascism, and during a time when Yeats was interested in mystical philosophy.

Attend the Community Read Coffee House with author Robert Morgan as he discusses Behind Yeats, Achebe, and "Coming Apart."

The Second Coming - W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?