Josephine Rowe’s Little World (2025) is a slender, exacting novel, the nucleus of which is the incorrupt body of a dead teenage girl. This girl is a putative saint who remains silent, motionless, and somehow unyielding to decay, yet her uncanny persistence in the world continues to impact the lives of the people who function as her custodians. As Tony Hughes‑d’Aeth argues in his review in the Conversation, the heroine ‘remains utterly impassive throughout the events of the narrative’ precisely because she is dead; yet, he adds, the dead present ‘themselves in the form of a question to the living’. The book’s shape is given less by plot reversals than by the way this body poses ethical, historical, and aesthetic problems for each custodian who must decide how to deal with her strange presence. Hughes‑d’Aeth aptly calls the saint’s non‑decay a ‘failing of entropy’, an anomaly that governs the novel’s design and its ‘point of immanence’ around which lives and places turn. From the outset, Rowe situates that anomaly within the afterlives of empire and extraction, in particular the ongoing structures of settler colonialism that organise Australian space and time. The novel’s itineraries, which span the Panama Canal Zone, phosphate-mined Nauru and the Australian mainland, trace not merely imperial circulation but the persistence of dispossession, ecological degradation, and the attempted eradication of Indigenous law and cosmology.
In this context, catastrophe does not arrive as a singular event or revelation, but as an accumulated condition, a pressure exerted through infrastructures of extraction, missionisation and social regulation. Rowe’s reworking of W. B. Yeats, a key intertext throughout the novel, must therefore be read through this colonial ground, where endurance and harm are sedimented rather than dramatically disclosed. The girl arrives from the Panama Canal Zone in the tiny Pacific island of Nauru, the surface of which has been hacked into a moonscape by phosphate mining. From there, she is transported to the northwest of Australia, where she becomes the ward of an elderly Norwegian immigrant named Orrin Bird, before being discovered decades later by a trio of women driving across the Nullarbor Plain. The body’s itinerary makes its own argument: sanctity (if this really is sanctity) travels the same shipping lanes and extraction routes as capital and labour. Endurance is entangled with the infrastructures that displace and damage people and places and whatever hermetic ‘message’ the saint might bear cannot be disentangled from these histories.
The title Little World announces Rowe’s dialogue with Yeats, forming a pointed reference to the introduction to The Celtic Twilight (1893) in which he writes: ‘I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant and significant things of this marred and clumsy world and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them’ (1). Yeats’s phrase is not merely decorative, naming as it does a project of salvage and arrangement, an artist’s effort to gather fragments of folk belief and mystical experience into a microcosm strong enough to withstand the pressures of modernity. Rowe inherits that ambition while reframing it: her ‘little world’ is built not from faery lore and pastoral reverie, but from horse‑floats, ruined outstations, phosphate scars and pandemic interiors. This world asks, furthermore, whether myth and beauty can be kept without perpetuating erasures or displacing harm onto those already burdened by it. The Yeatsian echo is therefore a double one, both homage and critique, an acknowledgment that aesthetic microcosms can inspire resistance while also risking complicity in the very formations they resist.
What commentators and Rowe herself make clear, however, is that Little World does more than restage a Yeatsian act of microcosmic curation: it exposes the contemporary conditions (ecological, historical and ethical) under which such world‑making becomes fraught. Critics emphasise that Rowe’s miniature cosmos is constructed not in defiance of the ‘marred and clumsy world’ (1), but in direct conversation with its ongoing violence. Meghan Racklin, for instance, describes the novel as full of ‘disasters, personal and tectonic – the trespass of land and of bodies, the ravaging of the planet and the way it ravages in return', a terrain shaped by extraction, forced movement, institutional neglect and environmental degradation. Jane O’Sullivan, meanwhile, notes how Rowe’s religious language and outback settings ‘raise the specter of the church’s history here and the ongoing impact of missions on Indigenous peoples and cultures', foregrounding the colonial and missionary infrastructures that continue to organise Australian life. The world that emerges is not Yeats’s visionary enclave but a sedimented accumulation of harm, care and unresolvable obligation.
This clarifies why an ethics of care in Rowe refuses to settle into belief or revelation. As explored in recent Yeats criticism, hospitality in his work is frequently shadowed by haunting, particularly in those poems that stage encounters between the living and the spectral or the returned. Sean G. Weidman argues, for instance, that ‘hospitality and haunting invariably go hand‑in‑hand in Yeats’s work', because the very spaces where welcome is extended are also those in which meaning becomes unstable and liable to fray (1026). This tension is not confined to Yeats’s early occult or folkloric work but recurs (albeit differently inflected) in later poems attentive to memory, loss and lingering presence, where relations between host and guest, living and dead, remain unresolved. Rowe’s houses, boxes, bunkers and way‑stations repeatedly operate as precisely such thresholds of ambivalent hospitality, where the act of offering shelter does not resolve the status of what is received, and where obligation persists but interpretation fails. Despite its religious overtones, the novel marks a decisive shift away from Yeats’s visionary metaphysics towards a material ethics of entanglement. Rowe reinforces this disenchanted movement by observing that her novel is engaged with ‘the faith of the secular, the belief of the non‑believer … the courage and ingenuity of the ex‑ or the lapsed believer’ (qtd in Labowskie). If the hereafter is here, she explains, ‘then that redirects our accountability to here (Soliphilia, in Glenn Albrecht’s term), rather than some moral abstract’ (qtd in Labowskie). Her metaphysical register is therefore not Yeats’s occult or esoteric twilight, but a spirituality of immanence, an ecologically and historically burdened attentiveness to the world as it is right now. Even Rowe’s style embodies this reorientation: Racklin, for instance, describes the novel as ‘a compact, sacred marvel’ characterised by a ‘compressed, consecrated, chronostratigraphic sound’, a layering of temporal and material strata rather than a lifting into symbolic coherence. Lisa Hill likewise notes a ‘quiet fury’ in the prose, a tolerance for ambiguity, and a refusal of the clarifying gesture, all qualities that distinguish Rowe’s world from the visionary unity for which Yeats often aimed. In this sense, Rowe’s ‘little world’ is less a refuge than a diagnostic space: a small, fragile arena in which questions of care, complicity and relinquishment are tested against the pressures of contemporary life.
Rowe announces that ethic in one crisp line: ‘Catholic or not. You don’t turn away a saint’ (5). This statement, placed in the opening movement when Orrin Bird accepts the dead girl’s custody, is the novel’s programmatic hinge. It inaugurates a secular custodianship, whereby belief is not required, but responsibility is. The microcosm that follows is constructed in the material and ethical register rather than the visionary register that Yeats imagines, consisting of unspectacular tasks (storing, shielding, carrying), improvisations of care, and ultimately a reckoning with whether keeping the corpse might itself become a kind of harm. Across the book’s triptych structure, as it shifts from the 1950s to the mid-1970s to the present day, Rowe threads other Yeatsian motifs and subjects them to Australian conditions. First, the saint’s body resembles the elusive figure in Yeats’s early poem ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, first published in 1897 under the title ‘A Mad Song’. The poem relates the protagonist’s fleeting vision of the trout he has caught being magically transformed into a ‘glimmering girl’, whom he pursues endlessly ‘[t]hrough hollow lands and hilly lands’ in a hopeless bid to regain the ‘[t]he silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun’ that symbolise his unrequited desire (60). In Little World, which makes several direct allusions to this poem, that pursuit is transformed into an ethics of keeping and letting‑go rather than possession. Orrin’s watchful guardianship of the saint in her tamanu box, for example, is marked by his manifest unwillingness to examine the body more closely. ‘Apart from this inviolability, he suspects that she is not miraculous, that she is of no greater faith or sanctity than he’, writes Rowe. ‘He does not say so. On waking, he has no desire either to confirm this vision or to relinquish it. No desire to open the tamanu box and compare the dream image to the earthly, incorruptible stuff. He desires, in fact, not to’ (Rowe 19). In contrast to Yeats’s protagonist, who yearns vainly to grasp and possess the mystical form of the magical girl, Orrin decides to leave the saint to her enclosed sanctity, preserving her status as a sacred object even though his motives in so doing have nothing to do with piety.
Rowe strategically couples ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, in which the protagonist wastes his youth chasing after the momentary glimpse of an unattainable dream, with Yeats’s later, more sophisticated exploration of the tension between mortality and endurance in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1927). In that poem, Yeats imagines an escape from the physical body from a place that is ‘no country for old men’ into an eternal, spiritual dimension: ‘Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing’ (193–94). The incorrupt body of the saint in Little World, by contrast, is the counter‑Byzantium: endurance without art’s metallurgic transfiguration, without religious certification, and without the possibility of a final interpretation. Rowe pointedly ironises the apparatus of sanctity, converting Yeats’s golden simulation into an administrative ledger of costs. At the same time, this juxtaposition of the sacred and the material recalls, more obliquely, Yeats’s own moments of unease about the physical afterlives of sanctity, where incorruptibility shades into something uncanny rather than purely miraculous. The novel’s tripartite time scheme also recasts the gyre logic of Yeats’s most famous work, ‘The Second Coming’ (1919). This poem names collapse as a turning of cycles – ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’ (187) – and awaits a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem. Rowe’s catastrophes, by contrast, are ambient and banal rather than brashly cataclysmic: termite erosion, bureaucratic neglect, institutional harm, the slow devastation of mined islands, and the isolation of quarantine. The mysterious ‘centre’ the novel proposes, in the form of the saint’s body, cannot grasp meaning in any definitive way; it holds only attention and obligation. If apocalypse is here, in Rowe, it comes as attrition that demands care in ruins, not prophecy.
Taken together, these literary reframings support the idea that Rowe’s novel channels Yeats to build a ‘little world’ in which desire, endurance and cyclical breakdown are translated into the materials and scales of Australian life. But she also unsettles Yeats’s consolations: permanence is not achieved by golden artifice but by ordinary maintenance; apocalypse does not clear a path for rebirth, it accumulates as damage to be carried; quests culminate not in visionary union but in ethical release. In this Australian Byzantium, belief persists as attentiveness, restraint and work, while myth is kept on probation. The novel’s final wager is neither faith nor resignation but reckoning: can beauty and belief endure without reproducing the forms of violence they seek to escape? Little World answers by assembling a microcosm that is less refuge than test case, a small, luminous world in ruins that asks the living to keep its light without looking away from the costs that make it glow.
Byzantium and the Artifice of Eternity: Incorruptibility vs. Flesh
When Yeats turns toward Byzantium, he imagines release from the liabilities of the flesh by consenting to be remade as art. In the climax of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, the aging speaker thus resolves to take on a new body constructed from ‘such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / Of hammered gold and gold enamelling’ (194). This is the poem’s wager: that the human longing for permanence can be met by an artifice of eternity, a crafted simulacrum capable of outlasting decay. Rowe’s Little World stages an inversion, whereby her incorrupt girl resists entropy not by being remade as art, but by simply, stubbornly remaining matter, a body that somehow fails to decay and thereby imposes itself on the living as a task and an ethical test. Permanence arrives without ornament, and its burden falls on people who neither sought it nor can interpret it. Orrin Bird, for instance, ‘has no notion of how to care for a saint. Even a small one. Does not even believe. Not in any one God, attended by angels and casting His divine judgement down from On High’ (5). With this simple description, Rowe shifts away from Byzantium’s golden solution toward the plain labour of keeping. Yet this is not to posit a strict opposition between the numinous and the material. Rather, the novel persistently entangles them: the saint’s body generates labour precisely because it cannot be disentangled from the aura of sanctity that attaches to it, even in the absence of belief. The sacred here does not disappear into the everyday but instead lingers as a remainder that complicates and unsettles the very labour it appears to demand.
Rowe marks the tone of this custodianship with a grammar of negative desire. Whereas Yeats composes a positive program to shed the natural and take an artistic form, Orrin refuses to look, to verify, and thus to settle meaning. The incorrupt body does not redeem mortality, but instead thickens the present with anxiety. Byzantium’s clarity (‘Once out of nature…’) becomes Orrin’s fear of definition, a reluctance to collapse the fragile aura that underwrites his care. In Rowe’s world, the price of endurance is vigilance rather than goldwork. This vigilance occurs at precisely the kinds of thresholds that Yeats scholars describe as unstable zones of obligation. The threshold, explains Weidman, is ‘the extra something that disturbs the system’, the ‘Derridean remainder that cannot be accounted for, the aporia that both animates and unsettles hospitable rituals’ (1030). Rowe’s narrative places Orrin, Matti and Tilde at such literal and figurative thresholds – doorways, pallets, boxes, sea‑edges – where the task is not to interpret the saint but to hold her without mastery.
The novel also exposes the machinery behind sanctity. If Byzantium is a metaphor for the perfected object, canonisation is its real-world bureaucracy. Rowe is unsparing: ‘There was still the tedious matter of veneration, obtaining official recognition from the Church. The requisite petitioning, locally and abroad, miracles to be recorded and attested to, relics to be examined. Bureaucracies that ran far beyond the family’s means and station’ (24). Such lines turn the ‘artifice of eternity’ into an administrative procedure, in which Yeats’s hammered bird is replaced by letters, forms, fees, an economic and classed threshold that sanctity cannot pass without assistance. Weidman invokes Derrida’s distinction between an ideal ethics of hospitality and the laws or politics that govern hospitality to conceptualise in Yeats a similar transformation to the one that Rowe performs here. The ‘laws (plural) of hospitality’ impose ‘limits, powers, rights, and duties’, observes Derrida, inevitably ‘challenging and transgressing the law of hospitality, the one that would command the ‘new arrival’ be offered an unconditional welcome’ (qtd. in Weidman 1030). In Little World, the saint’s veneration is likewise mediated through these plural laws: a process of authorisation, verification and clerical gatekeeping that converts Yeats’s mystical artifice into a recognisable administrative burden. Elsewhere, the apparatus assembled around the saint yields only banal relics: ‘They are objects of absolutely no use or importance to her: a comb, a holy book, some tacky beads and ornaments. (Why not weapons, something practical? Why not a knife, or a spear, or a sword edged with sharks’ teeth?)’ (25). Rowe’s parenthetical cuts through piety with pragmatism, deflating the aura that clings to ‘relics’ by asking what use they are, and to whom. Eternity becomes detritus, a museum of small things whose sacred significations can no longer be guaranteed. The language is deliberately compressed and rigorously structured, oriented towards symbolic objects but persistently questioning their transcendental authority.
If Yeats hopes to leave the ‘sensual music’ (193) and rise into pure art, Little World insists instead on the weight of the real, on houses menaced by termites, on dust and heat, on daily rituals of guarding and moving a box made from tamanu wood. Hughes‑d’Aeth aptly describes the incorrupt body as the novel’s ‘point of immanence’, a still centre that does not explain itself yet nonetheless organises care. It remains ineffable, its arrival evoking the aura of a saintly visitation, and it endures beyond successive custodians, subtly influencing and reshaping their decisions. In this way, Rowe relocates Byzantium’s metaphysical ambition into such Australian infrastructures as the outback road, the horse‑float and the administrative ledger, showing how permanence is enacted through work and constraint rather than achieved through art. The novel’s materials reinforce that relocation. In place of Yeats’s goldsmith’s fire, Rowe turns to geologic time and sediment: ‘People once believed that stones could grow, and why not? Limestone was just life heaped up on life heaped up on life and then pressed down hard over millennia’ (13–14). The sentence recasts ‘eternity’ as accretion, as matter layered by pressure and duration rather than Yeats’s transcendently remade form. In this register, the incorrupt body does not symbolise escape from nature; it joins an archive of harms and obligations, a record of what care and violence have pressed down. Eternity is not a perfected object but a sedimented condition.
Rowe’s scenes of relinquishment, which come at the end of the novel’s second act, complete the argument against Byzantium. The reader experiences this section through the eyes of Matti (Mathilde), one of a trio of young women driving across the Nullarbor Plain in search of adventure. An unplanned trip down a side road leads them to Orrin’s abandoned house where, punctuated by quotations from ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ – ‘And moth-like stars were flickering out’ (qtd. in Rowe 73) – Matti discovers first Orrin’s copy of Yeats’s poetry, then the body of the saint, still miraculously untouched by decay. After burning the Yeats book, Matti decides to return the girl to the sea as an elemental undoing of preservation, the words themselves seeming to disintegrate as the section closes:
The water will press in, against the frail seal of eyelids and lips, rushing past the small teeth and flooding the speechless mouth with brine, spilling on into airways, down the long-dormant corridors of arteries, fallow passageways, to reach the dry hollows of lungs and stomach, the empty ventricles of the silent, fist-sized muscle
the ocean like a great hand opening inside her her
own hands unclenching in response (107)
This is not the golden bird’s triumph over time that Yeats imagines in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, but the dissolution of a holy relic into its profane element, an implicit refusal to keep the ‘little world’ sealed in its sanctified bubble. Where Yeats’s solution is artifice, Rowe’s answer is release. The saint’s endurance is acknowledged and then returned to the earth. The lacquer that held her apart from the world is dissolved, and all that remains is the ethics of letting‑go after a long process of keeping. Little World thus rewrites Byzantium as labour and ambivalence. Yeats seeks an art form beyond flesh; Rowe keeps the flesh and tests those who live around it. Her incorruptibility generates work (packing, guarding, petitioning), anxiety (not to look, not to decide), and finally, a gesture of relinquishment. Permanence persists, not as ornament but as an ongoing obligation within the ruined and extractive landscapes that make up Rowe’s ‘little world’. In this Australian Byzantium, the central question is not how to transcend mortality by turning life into art, but how to carry the burdens that the endurance of life inevitably imposes.
The Second Coming: Cycles, Catastrophe and the Not‑End
In ‘The Second Coming’, Yeats gives modernity one of its most enduring grammars of catastrophe. Crisis arrives as the turning of gyres rather than a single, terminal event, a pattern of recurrence in which control frays and meaning slips: ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’ (187). The visionary momentum drives towards revelation, concluding with the stark tableau in which ‘A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun’ stirs in the sands, so that the famous question arises: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ (187–88). Rowe inherits the poem’s intuition that history turns and that centres fail while refusing its teleology of monstrous birth. Yeats’s imagery in ‘The Second Coming’ is not a loose apocalyptic gesture, argues John R. Harrison, but a ‘compelling example’ of his dialectical, historically specific symbolic method (Harrison 363). The rough beast belongs to a designed structure of contraries – the turning of dispensations – rather than an indiscriminate collapse of meaning. Rowe shrinks this dialectic: whereas Yeats imagines civilisation’s gyre reversing, Rowe maps the turning into termite rot, bureaucratic delays, quarantine routines and the small shocks of ordinary ruination. She thus borrows Yeats’s structure of recurrence only to miniaturise and localise it, translating epochal collapse into the slow attritions of Australian life.
Rowe marks this ethic early through the family dialogue surrounding Orrin Bird. The narrator recounts: ‘The persistent ring around the sun, and how folk then spoke of the End. But it wasn’t the End. So, there you have it, his father said: sometimes it looks like the End, but it isn’t. It was the End somewhere, put in Orrin’s mother, from behind her book. For a great lot of folk, that was the End. Then she dipped her head back into Tolstoy’s Russia’ (21-22). In these sentences, the father’s refrain – ‘sometimes it looks like the End, but it isn’t’ – relativises the poem’s civilisational claim. The mother’s correction – ‘It was the End somewhere’ – acknowledges that endings are unevenly distributed, and her quiet gesture of returning to ‘Tolstoy’s Russia’ underscores how literature mediates catastrophe: not as revelation but as thought, as the intimate work of reading in the midst of partial ruin. When the novel returns to this refrain, it does so with a parenthesis that bluntly names asymmetric devastation: ‘Orrin’s mother died believing the war would last forever. Did that matter? No, it was all the same war anyway. Sometimes it looked like the End, but it wasn’t. (Hiroshima. Nagasaki. For a great lot of folk: yes)’ (26). The effect is to provincialise Yeats’s universality. Collapse is not epochal once and for all; it arrives in parts, some spectacular (‘Hiroshima. Nagasaki.’) and others entirely unnoticed, such that the sense of ‘the End’ becomes a situated experience rather than a planetary verdict. This refusal of totalising revelation aligns with recent accounts of modernist temporality. As Rizwan Saeed Ahmed and Yasir Abbas note, modernism often hinges on fleeting ‘transcendent moments’ (290), instants that momentarily open onto a centred vision where, in the words of T. S. Eliot, ‘past and future are gathered’ (qtd. in Ahmed and Abbas 281). Whereas Yeats’s gyre depends on such a moment of revelation, Rowe systematically declines it. Her novel remains immanent and attritional, its crises never resolving into a coordinated vision but instead accumulating as conditions that require attention, patience and care.
Against Yeats’s prophetic drama, Rowe constructs catastrophe as custodianship of the mysterious saint. The incorrupt girl’s body is the novel’s ‘centre’, but it is a centre that cannot hold meaning, her uncanny stillness organising the living without disclosing its purpose. In this way, Little World offers an Australian answer to Yeats’s gyre: not the revelation of a rough beast, but rather catastrophe as ambient pressure rather than dramatic spectacle. This effect is inseparable from the ongoing conditions of settler colonialism, in which dispossession, extraction and institutional control accumulate as lived time rather than erupt as a singular crisis. Landscapes are felt as an ongoing wound and endurance is measured in heat, abrasion and patience. Consider Matti’s memories of the Blue House, a ‘refuge and adoption agency’ (55) for unmarried pregnant women, which functions as the site of a double loss: her ill-fated affair with an Indigenous woman named Sally, and the enforced removal of her own illegitimate child by the authorities. This history echoes broader regimes of child removal in Australia, in which Indigenous children were systematically separated from family, community and Country. The Blue House thus operates as both a site of personal loss and as part of a wider colonial apparatus that sought to regulate reproduction, sexuality and belonging. Matti’s story, entangled with her relationship to Sally, registers how these structures fracture intimacy while redistributing vulnerability along racialised lines. These thoughts are triggered by Matti’s contemplation of the Kalgoorlie Desert, ‘the parched bed of what was once sea, now studded with opalised remnants of Cretaceous sea creatures stranded far inland – fossils corresponding to indigenous lore of great tidal waves and floods, knowledge that was already ancient at the time of the Noah stories’ (54). The co-presence of fossilised remains and Indigenous cosmology marks the desert as a layered epistemological site in which European extraction and Indigenous law coexist uneasily. Rowe does not synthesise these knowledge systems, instead staging their partial visibility within a landscape already transformed by mining, where colonial exploitation overlays and obscures older relations to the land without fully extinguishing them. This co-presence also signals the limits of the novel’s custodial ethic: Indigenous understandings of Country, ancestry and obligation are grounded in deep time and ongoing relations that do not reduce to the provisional keeping and release that structures Rowe’s narrative. While the novel remains attentive to these longer epistemologies, it does not presume to speak from within them, instead situating its ethics within a settler framework in which the authority to decide when preservation becomes harm remains uncertain and contested.
Against the gyre’s pull toward terror, Rowe imagines an ethic of release. The saint’s oceanward ending – unwitnessed, tender, elemental – refuses the fantasy that catastrophe produces revelation. It culminates instead in Matti letting go, dissolving preservation back into the world it kept at bay. The vocabulary of opening and unclenching that closes the novel’s second act answers Yeats without summoning a beast. The lacquer that formerly held the girl apart from time and element gives way, so that care completes its cycle not by securing a new centre but by releasing her from the old one. Where Yeats’s poem anticipates a monstrous birth at the end of history, Little World finds its not‑end in a practised gesture: to keep, to carry, and, when keeping becomes harm, to let go. Read through Yeats, the novel’s temporal design clarifies: the 1950s desert, the 1970s road trip and the pandemic in the present do not mark progress toward a resolution, signifying instead returns to ethical obligations that were formed under different pressures. Each temporal spiral brings with it another form of attrition – termite damage, neglect, institutional ‘care’ – and another improvisation of response. In the midst of it all, the saint’s body remains uninterpretable yet insistent, the world remains marred, and the living learn the responsibilities of holding. Rowe’s second coming, then, is not an eschatology but an ethics, a recurrent demand that the living answer the dead with acts of custody and, when the time is right, release.
Yet even this moment of apparent closure does not constitute a final ending, as the story continues into a third act that sees Matti, now transformed into Tilde after several decades of self-imposed solitude. This part of the story takes place at the edge of the Nullarbor, where prophecy has been domesticated into habit. The narrator of the novel’s final section writes of the outpost and its unusual keeper:
This used to be the kind of place that people sought out, removed to, in order to Prepare. A place others have never left, never had the means to leave. That’s how it goes, world over. Flat-earthers, doomsday prophets, climate migrants. All moved by some tidy compulsion to see out the end of the world from the end of the world. Tilde has lived a long time here … [and although] much of her verbal communication came in the form of poems learnt by rote – Twenty centuries of stony sleep, and so on – she could still chop a cord of firewood, care for the trees, keep herself and her carriage-home together. (116–17)
The italicised Yeatsian fragment from ‘The Second Coming’ is reduced to the idiom of rote. It recurs not as omen but as habit, a way of speaking that has been worn smooth by time. Apocalypse has been transformed into the banality of domestic labour: chopping firewood, tending trees, assembling the body’s survival from stewed apples and homemade ‘champagne’ (116). In this register, Yeats’s ‘widening gyre’ is no longer a spiral towards revelation but a pattern of attrition whose answer is care.
Read in dialogue, Yeats and Rowe agree that history turns and that centres fail, but they diverge decisively in what catastrophe discloses and what it demands. Yeats’s vision gathers crisis into a singular, symbolic event whose monstrous figure names a new dispensation; Rowe disperses crisis across lives and landscapes, counting costs rather than naming beasts and answering harm with custody rather than with awe. The refrain ‘sometimes it looks like the End, but it isn’t’ (21) does not deny apocalypse; it stipulates that ‘[i]t was the End somewhere’ (21) while admitting, with parenthetical bluntness, that ‘For a great lot of folk: yes’ (26). The ethics that follow are resolutely local: who pays; who is spared; who keeps; who, at the right time, releases. In this Australian microcosm, the rough beast never arrives. What arrives instead is attrition, and the centre that cannot hold is not a herald of revelation but a demand for care.
Beyond the Celtic Twilight
When Yeats prefaces The Celtic Twilight with his desire ‘to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world’ (1), he articulates a desire to gather fragments of folk belief and visionary experience into a durable microcosm capable of resisting the abrasion of colonial impositions. Rowe’s title Little World declares itself to be an echo of this ambition, but her novel immediately relocates and revises Yeats’s program. Whereas Yeats’s ‘little world’ is a visionary Ireland composed of faery survivals and rural intimacies, Rowe’s is an Australian reliquary built from damaged places and small acts of care: horse‑floats and termite-bitten rooms, Nullarbor roads and lockdown interiors, phosphate moonscapes and impromptu shrines. The ‘significant things’ of Rowe’s microcosm are not consoling relics of folk enchantment; they are objects and obligations extracted from histories of displacement and harm caused by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their land and the imposition of colonial rule. This shift mirrors recent postcolonial readings of Yeats’s own microcosmic ambitions: Weidman, for example, argues that Yeats’s attachment to hospitality carries with it a utopian impulse, a hope that ancient forms of welcome might ground a renewed ethical imagination. Yet, following Mireille Rosello, Weidman also emphasises how, despite hospitality’s failures, its perverse or compromised moments, ‘the generative power of hospitable systems is visible in their ability to force the Derridean divergences of a society’s ethics and politics back into conversation’ (1046). Rowe builds her microcosm atop precisely such compromised inheritances, on sites where care is necessary but never uncomplicated.
The novel establishes this ethic of secular custodianship in which the artist’s ‘little world’ becomes a practice of material care rather than Yeats’s spiritual vision of establishing a national soul. In Yeats, the artist selects and displays; in Rowe, the keeper stores, shields, worries, carries, and, ultimately, lets go. The microcosm is made rather than imagined, assembled across supply routes and administrative corridors, its continuance dependent on human labour rather than on numinous continuity. The novel’s very materials, including the tamanu box, the horse‑float, the ledger of costs, all insist on this fact, and whenever sanctity threatens to congeal into aura, Rowe pricks it with pragmatism. The book’s inventory of the saint’s ‘relics', for instance, refuses easy veneration, reminding us that use, and the ethics of use, matter more than ornament in a world made harsh by extraction and neglect.
Rowe’s ‘twilight’ is likewise retuned from occult hours to deep time, a conception of vast emptiness that draws on a constellation of ideas, from ‘what the Little Sisters would have called Kenosis, what the Buddhists call Śūnyatā, and what the Taoists call The Ten Thousand Things, which certain metaphysicists call Contemplation of the Void’ (53–54). Rather than attempting to recover the sentimental enchantment of Yeats’s dim borderland of faery and folk, Rowe reads accretion: bodies, objects, wounds and obligations layered under pressure. In this register, the incorrupt girl is not the emblem of an escape from nature (as Yeats’s elder would seek to do in Byzantium), so much as yet another addition to the sediment, another uncompromising piece in the archive the living must carry, interpret cautiously, and finally return.
That return is the novel’s answer to the problem of the ‘little world.’ Whereas Yeats’s artist holds a carefully curated microcosm in the mind’s museum, Rowe’s keeper refuses to retain things forever. Matti’s oceanward act of pushing the saint’s body into the water is imagined as an elemental undoing of preservation. Release dissolves the lacquer that set the reliquary apart, returning the relic to the forces it had held at bay: time, element, rot, sea, all the material things in this world. With this gesture, Rowe completes her difference from Yeats. The ‘little world’ survives only so long as custodianship retains its true character as an ethics of care. This framing, however, does not claim universality within the Australian context. Indigenous understandings of land, ancestry and custodianship, grounded in deep time and ongoing relations between people, Country and the nonhuman, operate according to different epistemologies, in which care is neither provisional nor subject to individual judgement in the same way. Rowe’s novel, while attentive to these histories and forms of knowledge, does not presume to speak from within them. Instead, it stages the limits of a settler-inflected ethics of keeping and release, raising but not resolving the question of who has the authority to determine when preservation becomes harm. If this process hardens into something harmful, the right and proper task is to unclench, to let go, to allow disintegration to take place. Beauty and belief are not banished, but instead are held on probation, admitted only insofar as they serve the living’s duties amid the sedimented ruins of time.
Rowe’s title thus operates both as homage and as counterargument. She inherits Yeats’s desire to assemble ‘beautiful, pleasant, and significant things', but she places those things inside a marred world that cannot be purified, from Panama’s canal works to Nauru’s mined surface to Australia’s scarred interiors. The saint’s itinerary through these wounded landscapes recalls what Weidman identifies as Yeats’s most enduring colonial allegory: the twelfth‑century episode in which Diarmaid Mac Murchadha ‘invites’ English forces into Ireland, a hospitality that becomes a colonial occupation. Rowe’s saint is likewise an impossible guest whose presence is unchosen, unassimilable, and carried forward along the same extractive corridors that produced the landscapes she traverses. The novel’s microcosm is neither refuge nor nation‑soul, but rather a test case in ethical attention, a small world we keep only if we can keep it without erasure. In Rowe’s Australian twilight, myth is allowed only when it agrees to work as care, and care is allowed only when it faces up to what it keeps.
Conclusion: Myth as Consolation and Critique
Yeats’s dream of permanence, whether through Byzantium’s hammered gold, the gyre’s patterned apocalypse, or the Celtic Twilight’s curatorial ‘little world’, offers a vocabulary for resisting historical ruin. Josephine Rowe’s Little World inherits that vocabulary while submitting it to Australian conditions: landscapes marked by extractive industry, settler colonial afterlives, institutional neglect and ecological attrition. More specifically, these conditions are structured by the ongoing logic of settler colonialism, in which dispossession operates not as a singular historical event but as a continuing organisation of land, labour and life. In this context, catastrophe registers as cumulative and ambient rather than apocalyptic, shaping the novel’s emphasis on attrition, maintenance and uneven harm. In this setting, myth cannot simply console, becoming a double-edged instrument that, while it is capable of sustaining care, nonetheless remains haunted by its complicity in a history of dispossession and oppression. In Rowe, permanence accumulates as detritus, and the question of use takes precedence over aura, so that meaning ultimately lies in custodianship rather than revelation. Where Yeats’s apocalypse anticipates a monstrous birth and his Byzantium a perfected object, Rowe opts for an ethical dissolution whereby custodianship must yield to letting‑go when preservation hardens into harm.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a grant from the University of Macau (SRG2024-00036-FAH)