Motherhood Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats opens with a brutal origin story: not pastoral Ireland, but an Ireland that breeds “great hatred” in “little room,” a pressure-cooker nation where history and intimacy collide. The phrasing is deliberately cramped. “Little room” isn’t just poverty or geography; it’s the moral claustrophobia of a culture trained to remember injuries, to take sides, to live inside inherited arguments. “Maimed us at the start” turns that atmosphere into bodily damage, suggesting that identity arrives already wounded, already narrowed.

Then comes the line that stings: “I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart.” Yeats makes fanaticism prenatal, not chosen. It’s a provocation aimed at romantic nationalism as much as at British caricatures of the Irish. He’s confessing complicity while indicting the conditions that manufacture zeal. The “mother’s womb” does double duty: the literal mother, Ireland as mythic Mother, and the nationalist tradition that claims to birth its sons into purity. Yeats flips that myth into something darker. If the nation is the mother, what she transmits is not innocence but obsession.

Context matters: Yeats spent his career wrestling with Irish political passion, alternately courting and mistrusting it, especially as the revolutionary period hardened into sectarian certainty. These lines don’t posture above the fray; they expose the poet’s own susceptibility to the intoxicating idea of a cause. The artistry is the self-accusation: he refuses the comfort of blaming only “them,” insisting that the fanatic is also “I,” formed before he could even speak.