The Fascination of What's Difficult
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Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryA poet curses the theatre work that has drained his joy.
The poet complains that his fascination with hard tasks has "dried the sap out of my veins" and torn the natural joy from his heart. His poetic gift is pictured as a winged horse of divine blood, made instead to haul road stone under the whip. He curses the plays that must be "set up in fifty ways", the daily war with knaves and fools, and the grind of "Theatre business, management of men". The last lines are a vow: before the next dawn he will go to the stable and "pull out the bolt", setting his gift free.
Lines to remember
The fascination of what's difficult
Theatre business, management of men.
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 3The dried sap
The poem starts with its title and a confession. His attraction to difficulty has "dried the sap out of my veins", like a withered tree, and "rent", or torn, "Spontaneous joy and natural content" out of his heart.
Lines 4 to 8The overworked colt
"There's something ails our colt": the poet's gift is a horse of "holy blood" that once leaped "from cloud to cloud" on Olympus. Now it must "Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt" like a cart-horse dragging "road metal". The run of harsh verbs makes the labour felt.
Lines 9 to 11The curse
"My curse on plays", begun at the end of line 8, names the cause. Plays must be staged "in fifty ways", there is a daily war "with every knave and dolt", and there is the flat line "Theatre business, management of men", which sounds exactly like the drudgery it describes.
Lines 12 to 13The vow
He swears that before dawn he will "find the stable and pull out the bolt", freeing the colt. The poem ends with a sudden, decisive action after so much complaint.
Themes
Art and drudgery
The poem sets the free flight of poetry against the grinding work of running a theatre. The colt has "holy blood" and belongs on Olympus, yet it is made to drag "road metal" under the lash. "Theatre business, management of men" is deliberately unpoetic, a line that shows what practical work does to verse.
Loss of joy
The opening lines describe a kind of inner drought: sap dried from the veins, "Spontaneous joy and natural content" torn from the heart. The fascination with difficulty is shown as a trap, a pull towards hard tasks that slowly exhausts the gift it was meant to serve.
Freedom
The final vow, to "pull out the bolt", turns the poem from complaint to resolve. Releasing the colt means returning poetry to its natural life. Whether he keeps the vow is left open, but the poem ends on the promise of release before "the dawn comes round again".
Context
The poem was published in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (Cuala Press, 1910), a book in which Yeats's style becomes leaner, more public and more direct. It reflects his years of work for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which opened in 1904 and which he helped to direct with Lady Gregory and J. M. Synge, dealing daily with plays, actors, audiences and money.
The colt of "holy blood" that leaps on Olympus is Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek myth traditionally linked with poetic inspiration. Yeats uses the old symbol to show how far the business of the theatre had pulled him from the free life of poetry.
Form
Thirteen lines of iambic pentameter in one block. The line endings "difficult", "colt", "jolt", "dolt" and "bolt" rhyme five times, tying the poem together, while pairs such as "rent" and "content", "plays" and "ways" fill the gaps. Sentences break off in mid-line and run on, so the verse itself seems to "strain, sweat and jolt".
