Philosophy
Lovers!
Click Here

[In his poem, “Why Should Not Old Men be Mad?”, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) gives us the opposite attitude to that of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Celestial Surgeon.” In Yeats’s poem elemental pessimism, or what one might call the modern attitude, is given the run of the house. (There are some sour grapes here: the “girl that knew all Dante once” is the woman who rejected Yeats’s proposal of marriage, and the “dunce” is the Irish revolutionary she did marry.)]

WHY should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream,
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort,
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.

Here is a reading of it by the famous Irish actor Cyril Cusack:

Why Should Not Old Men be Mad?

Click HERE to reach the associated topic for this webpage.
For more topics click HERE.