The Irish Poem Chinua Achebe copied Things Fall Apart from

The title of “Things Fall Apart” is taken from the poem “The Second Coming,” which was written by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It was written in 1920, after the end f the First World War and during the Irish civil war which followed independence. The poem reflects the violence of the time around him, the bloodshed and dissolution of certainties which the previous years had broughht to Europe. Here’s the poem:

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 conviction, 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?

Basically, the poem is apocalyptic. It’s about the end of an age, the coming of something new and terrifying. And that’s basically the theme of the book “Things Fall Apart:” the downfall of the old civilizations of Africa in the face of European colonialism. So yes, implicitly colonialism is World War One. I think we can all guess what we are supposed to read into that.