Accursed Who Brings to Light of Day
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryA mock curse on anyone who publishes the poet's discarded writings.
A comic curse in two couplets. Whoever brings to light the writings the poet has "cast away" is accursed; whoever leaves them alone, and lets "the kind worm take the lot", is blessed. The solemn words "Accursed" and "blessed" sound like an old inscription on a tomb, but the worm turns them into a joke. The poet wants his rejected work left to rot in peace.
Lines to remember
And lets the kind worm take the lot!
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Curse and blessing
Lines 1 and 2 curse anyone who digs out "The writings I have cast away"; lines 3 and 4 bless the one who "stirs them not". The blessing ends on a grimly funny image: the worm, eating paper as it eats bodies, is "kind" because it destroys what the poet does not want seen.
Themes
The poet's control
Yeats cared intensely about which of his poems survived and in what form. The curse shows that care as a joke with a serious edge: the rejected writings are treated like a body in a grave, and anyone who disturbs them becomes a kind of grave-robber.
Irony
Placed among the early and uncollected poems, the very writings Yeats set aside, the quatrain gains a wry twist. Every reader of his discarded verse falls, in a small way, under its curse, and the poem itself has been brought to light.
Context
The quatrain is a witty companion to "The Friends That Have It I Do Wrong": both defend the poet's right to decide what his work should be. Its shape recalls the verse on Shakespeare's gravestone at Stratford, which blesses the man who spares the stones and curses the one who moves the bones. Yeats's discarded poems, like a buried body, are to be left in peace.
Form
Two rhyming couplets in four-beat lines ("day", "away"; "not", "lot"). The first couplet curses and the second blesses, in the balanced pattern of an epitaph. The plain, everyday "take the lot" at the end deflates the solemn opening word.
