The poem can be broken into 3 parts; lines 1-8 describe the Fisherman, lines 9-24 candidly state Yeats’ distaste for contemporary society, and lines 29-40 return back to the imaginary ideal of the Fisherman. The Fisherman by W.B. Yeats depicts the author's conception of an ideal reader. W.B.Yeats  For a poem it is so linguistically simple, the syntax is made to work very hard as Yeats composes the 40 line poem of only three sentences, the first comprising only 8 lines, while the second two both use 16. Semi-colons and commas, setting off phrases and clauses, abound, giving the lie to the simplicity of its surface.