War & Peace Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats takes a ceremonial reflex - glorify the war dead - and snaps it in half with a colder, stranger dare: the bravest battlefield might be internal. The opening question isn’t pacifist piety; it’s a challenge to a culture that treats courage as a public spectacle, something you can pin medals on. By calling combat death “the field of battle,” he invokes the whole pageantry of national mythmaking, then immediately undercuts it with the word “reckless,” a sly demotion. If courage is reckless, it’s not automatically virtuous; it can be vanity, programming, crowd hypnosis.

Then he pivots to “the abyss of himself,” a phrase that drags heroism out of the parade ground and into psychological free fall. “Abyss” suggests not self-improvement but confrontation with chaos, guilt, desire, contradiction - the parts of the self that don’t line up with patriotic narrative or even with one’s own preferred story. Yeats isn’t romanticizing introspection; he’s making it sound as dangerous as war, and pointedly less legible. No uniform. No witnesses. No clean ending that can be carved into stone.

Context matters: Yeats lived through the convulsions of Irish nationalism, the Easter Rising, and the Great War’s industrial slaughter, all of which turned death into a kind of political currency. His line refuses the easy trade: blood for meaning. The subtext is a rebuke to societies that outsource moral seriousness to battlefields while ignoring the harder labor of self-knowledge - the kind that can dismantle fanaticism rather than feed it.