All Things can tempt Me
Listen
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryA poet, weary of his craft, wishes to be cold as a fish.
Yeats lists what has drawn him away from writing: once "a woman's face", and worse, the "seeming needs" of his "fool-driven land". Now anything at all tempts him more easily than the familiar work of verse. He remembers that as a young man he cared only for poets who sang with such swagger you would think they kept a sword upstairs. Now he would rather be "Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish". The poem is a tired, witty confession about the cost of a public life.
Lines to remember
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 5What tempts him
Verse is a "craft", and nearly everything tempts him from it: "a woman's face", then something "worse", the "seeming needs" of his "fool-driven land", meaning politics. Now "nothing but comes readier to the hand" than "this accustomed toil".
Lines 6 to 8The young man's taste
Looking back ("When I was young" begins at the end of line 5), he admits he would not have given "a penny for a song" unless the poet sang it "with such airs" that you believed "he had a sword upstairs", a man of action in disguise.
Lines 9 to 10Colder than a fish
The wish now is the opposite of swagger. He would be "Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish": silent, unfeeling, shut off from the noise. The piled comparatives and the comic fish keep self-pity at bay.
Themes
The poet's craft
Poetry here is not inspiration but "craft" and "accustomed toil", a trade like any other, and a hard one. Yeats presents his distractions as temptations, as if writing were a discipline he keeps failing to keep. The weariness is real, but so is the loyalty: he is tempted away precisely because this is the work he is meant to do.
Love and politics
The two great distractions are named quickly. "A woman's face" points to love, and "the seeming needs of my fool-driven land" to Irish politics, where Yeats had spent years. "Seeming" and "fool-driven" show how bitter he had become: the needs only seemed real, and fools were doing the driving.
Changing ideals
The young Yeats wanted his poets heroic, singing "with such airs" that one pictured "a sword upstairs". The older man wants the reverse, a cold, deaf withdrawal. The fish at the end is deliberately unheroic, a joke at the expense of both the swaggering poet and his tired older self.
Context
The poem was first collected in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (Cuala Press, 1910). "A woman's face" is usually taken to be Maud Gonne's, whose nationalist politics had drawn Yeats into public causes through the 1890s. By 1910 he was weary of public life, and other poems in the collection, such as "The Fascination of What's Difficult", complain of how theatre business and controversy ate into his time for verse.
Form
Five rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter ("verse" and "worse", "land" and "hand"), with "young" and "song" only half rhyming. The sentences run across the couplets, so the rhymes never feel neat and the tone stays conversational and dry. The last couplet closes cleanly, landing the joke on "fish".
