ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Achebe uses this opening stanza of William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming, ” from which the title of the novel is taken, as an epigraph to the novel.

Detailed explanation-2: -Achebe named his book Things Fall Apart which is an allusion to the poem “Second Coming” which is about an end of the world scenario. He used it as an allusion to make a connection between Okonkwo’s life “ending” from his point of view and the second coming end of world scenario of the Christians.

Detailed explanation-3: -Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the first book to borrow a line from “The Second Coming, ” cleverly inverts the poem: here African civilization is the one under threat, and the rough beast is the West.

Detailed explanation-4: -Achebe uses Yeats’ poem as an epigraph to foreshadow how the events in the novel later on might occur. Reading the epigraph, we come to understand that Yeats is referring to an image of disaster and to a society that is losing control.

Detailed explanation-5: -blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, the preeminent dramatic and narrative verse form in English and also the standard form for dramatic verse in Italian and German.