Yeats's “Running to Paradise” as a Means to Make the Argument for Humility Anonymous 12th Grade

In "Running to Paradise," W.B. Yeats recounts the conditions present when the speaker in this poem embarks on journey to Paradise and his personal observation from his journey. “Running to Paradise” illustrates the theme of ensuring that successes are always judged relatively. It is only this that will allow individuals to accept failures later on but most importantly to criticize society for losing humility once they themselves achieve success because most often they forget about helping others obtain success as well.

Yeats’s shifts from colloquial diction to jargon, illustrates Yeats’s fear of having individuals ignore or be unable to understand his warnings about understanding that a society must be both mentally and physically prepared for adversity because a lack of preparedness will make it prone to almost complete collapse and failure. The shift in diction from colloquial to jargon illustrates Yeats’s frustration and fear that everyone will continue to act in the same way even after constant demonstrations in their home countries and even after the poem warns them explicitly about the inevitability adversity. For example the term “halfpenny,” is in literal terms half a penny, which implies that although society believes...