No Second Troy Themes
Guilt and Blame
Of course this poem is about blame: the first five words are "Why should I blame her"! The beauty of a rhetorical question like this is that you can blame her and still make it seem like you are be...
Politics
The first decades of the 20th century were very tumultuous for Ireland, which was then still a colony of Britain. Irish intellectuals of all stripes, including both Yeats and Maud Gonne (the woman...
Memory and the Past
Yeats is someone for whom "the past is never past." He viewed history as interlocking periods of increasing or decreasing order and authority. The fall of the ancient city of Troy marked one such b...
Gender
The issue of gender arises in "No Second Troy" through the comparison between Maud Gonne and Helen of Troy. We don't want to oversimplify Yeats's thoughts on women. Yes, he had a conservative perso...