Achebe and Yeats: Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart vis-à-vis The Second Coming

The novel Things Fall Apart by the African author Chinua Achebe, is similar to the poem The Second Coming by the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. Despite the differences in their author’s race, genres, and the age gap between these two literary pieces, with the former published in 1958 , and in the United States in 1959, and the latter composed in 1920 , Things Fall and The Second Coming are analogous to one another since they both speak of inevitable change and the contrasting worlds of the ancient times, and the modern age.

Achebe begins his novel with a quote from the first four lines of Yeats' The Second Coming, not simply because the quote contains the phrase “things fall apart,” which is the novel’s title, but because it serves as a summary of the entire novel itself, but in a deep, symbolic manner.

“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.”

(Yeats. Lines 1-4, 1st Stanza. “The Second Coming.”)

These lines’ meaning cannot be easily grasped by merely reading it, even for a number of times. Its meaning is locked w