Yeats book of poems, 1928
Fishburn and Hughes: "A collection of poems by W.B. Yeats published in 1928. The lines 'So the Platonic Year / Whirls out new right and wrong', quoted as an epigraph to the story 'Theme of the Traitor and the Hero', come from section 2 of Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, written in response to atrocities committed during 1919 by the Black and Tans at Gort in Galway. The poem contrasts images of the past with the present in which 'the growing murderousness of the world' reappears. The passage evokes the concept of recurring history and the theme of men acting according to a 'prefigured' scheme, both central to the story. The term 'Platonic Year' refers to Plato's theory enunciated in the Timaeus (39), concerning the revolution of the planets which will eventually return to their starting point (Etern. 92)." (199)