I like how the poem embodies the advice it gives in lines 4-6, how effortless it seems, though we know of course the effort involved.

The word that fascinates me most in this poem is the word "it" in the penultimate line. "It had all seemed happy," meaning their love? Which calls into question the word "happy"--not a word I expect Yeats to use describing love.

Great poem!

"Great poem," yes, for me particularly so in serving as "an immediate practical example" -- I believe I'm quoting Whitman here (?) -- of the transcendence of labor into beauty. Speaking of poetry and of beauty, the text per force must embody it (for this reason the return to romantic and Medieval idiom at various junctures, serving as time-proofed "beauty-speak"?). And then the sad note at the last, of human defeat even given hard won success and striving -- ain't that the case for all of us who live beyond the Garden walls, the burning sword forbidding return? Barry

The depth of irony in that word "happy" strikes me as the real subject of this poem. There is a dark subtext that tells us "Labor as you will, and attain what you will, desire will betray you, and so will art, and so will love." What we really labor to conceal--in art as elsewhere--is our own imperfection, our own dissatisfaction with all that we attempt (and the results of our attempt). The poet always knows the weak points in his or her poem; the lover always knows where love falls short. The very fact that the speaker has married (I suppose) the "you" but still desires the "she," the third character, is symptomatic: everything in the picture is "hollow." On one level the poem is about the attempt to unify--to hold things together, to keep up the appearance of an effortless unity (whether it be in the poem, or in the face that confronts one in the mirror, or in ones relationships). Likewise it is, you might say, a mis-marriage of discourses: it soars, it mutters, it chats, it sings. The narrator is high-minded and egotistical, idealistic and domineering: controlling. So: he's human. At this point, refer to Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" and you are at endgame--endgame being the doomed heroism of all human efforts to hold ourselves together, from the writing of poems to prinking in front of a mirror. Things--let's see, who said it? Who, who? Hmm--fall apart. And if, observing this, the reader finds the effort the poem portrays pretentious or belittling, that tells us something important about the reader; or, if the reader finds him- or herself moved to tears as at the ending of a high tragedy, that tells us something else. This is why a) Yeats is extremely cool, and b) almost impossible to teach to the average undergraduate.

Yes, Terry, imperfection, and the need to labor, and the limits of "beautiful" and "happy" and other worked-for adjectives.

I hope you take a look at MaryAnn's response to what you say, toward the end of the thread at:

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I did follow the link; thank you, Robert. It occurs to me that I should also have said something, up there, about the postlapsarian world the poem's title invokes. Within the "standard" Christian frame (and probably most nonstandard ones as well) the possibility of either love or art going right are pretty remote. It's interesting to speculate on where Adam and Eve have got to, 6042 years (or however many our fundamentalist friends discover in the Biblical countdown) after the fact. It's been a spectacularly long marriage; everything that can go wrong has gone wrong; affairs, betrayals, beach volleyball, every heinous thing you can think of, and yet there they are, still talking about "beauty" and "poetry" and "love." I have often imagined the reunion of Helen and Agamemnon after that little unpleasantness in Troy: they got back together! Good lord. What did they talk about? Not that Yeats's characters are literally Adam and Eve--but in terms of the archetype, they are emanations of the original: in the fallen world, nothing much essentially changes. That hollowness at the end of the poem is personal, yes, but in this scenario the personal is also mythic.

Terry, I've enjoyed all your posts on the PoemsFray with their combination of irreverence, good sense and poetic insights.

Besides your fine "History of Prose" poem which Robert posted here, I also like your "Years."

Thanks for stopping by. Come again -- any Tuesday.

Thank you, Mary Ann. Likewise! I pop in and out, and lurk around virtually every week, but I only chime in when I think I have something to contribute. And of course mainly when my old pal Wyn Cooper goes first!