June 03, 2026

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Yeats wrote this in 1919, in the immediate aftermath of World War One and amid the Irish War of Independence. His personal life was equally unsettled — he had recently married Georgie Hyde-Lees after a string of romantic rejections, and he was deep in the automatic writing experiments that would become A Vision. The poem describes civilizational collapse, but Yeats was also describing something he personally knew: the feeling that every structure you relied on is cracking at once. That specific feeling — when several things are failing at the same time — is exactly where equanimity is tested, and this line names it honestly rather than dressing it up.