The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

When Chinua Achebe was writing the book, Things Fall Apart, he had just read and thought about the poem written by William Butler Yeats. The book has many similar qualities and many of the things in the book symbolize objects in the poem. For example, the tribe becoming farther apart and widening of ideas is like the first line of the poem. Or Okonkwo's son leaving him to convert is like the second line. Out of the third line comes the title of Chinua's book and the clan and life altogether for Okonkwo, falling out the bottom. The fourth line has a lot of similarities to when the white men come to Umuofia. The poem made Chinua write the book, Things Fall Apart, because he felt so moved by the poetry of William Butler Yeats.

The first line of the poem, "The Second Coming," is very similar to the section of the book, Things Fall Apart, when the tribe is loosing its camaraderie and heading more in the direction of the new religion. The widening gyre is the tribe becoming further apart. Obierika said, "Our own men and our sons have joi

The fourth line of this stanza sums up the end of the book and it is easy to tell that Chinua based the story upon the poem by Yeats. The white men are the anarchy that has been loosed upon the world. "Some of these prisoners were men of title who should be above such mean occupation," (Pg. 160, Paragraph 1). The white men came and instated their own type of government with their own rules so that clansmen, who were following clan rules, were thrown into jail because of the new laws. The missionaries have been sent to convert some black men but they don't stop at that. They wait until they have some local support and they set up their own way of life and enforce it upon these clans. They do what is in their eyes as good, but not comprehending that maybe this isn't such a good idea for some third world African tribe. By the time the black men figure out that the white men aren't there just to convert people, it is too late and the albinos have a grip on the Africans' society.

The third line in the poem is very obvious to be significant because one half of it is used as the title of the book written by Chinua; Things Fall Apart. He uses that line as the title because it fits nicely with the theme of the story. The clan splitting over the new religion in the end symbolizes the second half of that verse. "We who are here this morning have remained true to our fathers, but our brothers have deserted us and joined a stranger to soil their fatherland. If we fight the stranger we shall hit our brothers an

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1018
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)