Poems I Like: The Fascination of What's Difficult by W.B. Yeats

I gave a library tour today and a student (actually a prospective student) asked me my favourite poet. Nobody ever asks me great questions like this. People ask me the same kind of questions they ask you, I'm sure: how long does it take you to get into work, what did you do at the weekend, do you have any holidays booked, etc? I hadn't even mentioned poetry. (Incidentally, the student told me his own favourite poet was Rudyard Kipling, a choice I wholeheartedly praised.)

Anyway, there is only one answer for me: W.B. YEATS.

Yeats seems to me to be so much the greatest English language poet that I wonder why everyone doesn't agree with me. Nearly everything he wrote was brilliant.

"The Fascination of What's Difficult" is one of his lesser poems, but it's still a great poem. Presumably we've all experienced this fascination; doing something the hard way rather than the easy way, just for the sake of it. And feeling no choice in the matter!

There's something about Yeats poems that I can best describe by the term "contour". I have this notion that you could replace the words of a Yeats poem with almost any other words, as long as you preserved the sentence structure and rhyme scheme, and you'd still have a good poem-- the "bones" are that strong. (I've even thought of doing this myself). Very often he had a long, sinuous, tentative line followed by a short, punchy line. But that's just one example in his box of tricks.

The Fascination of What's Difficult

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.