The Friends That Have It I Do Wrong
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryThe poet answers friends who dislike his habit of revising his poems.
Four lines of self-defence. Some of the poet's friends complain that he does wrong whenever he rewrites an old poem. They should understand, he says, what is really at stake: in remaking the song he is remaking himself. Revision is not fussing over words but a way of growing as a person, and the neat couplets make the argument sound settled.
Lines to remember
It is myself that I remake.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Remaking the self
The friends think it wrong whenever he remakes "a song". The first three lines set out their complaint and his warning that they should know "what issue is at stake". The last line answers with a turn: "It is myself that I remake." Poet and poem change together.
Themes
Revision
Yeats revised his early poems throughout his life, sometimes heavily, and readers who loved the first versions objected. This quatrain is his reply. It treats revision as a serious act rather than a matter of taste: the "issue" at stake is the poet's own growth.
Making a self
The last line makes the self something that can be rebuilt, like a poem. By rewriting a song, the poet becomes a different man. The idea that a life can be shaped with the same care as a poem runs through Yeats's later thinking.
Context
Yeats reworked his early poems again and again, and this quatrain is his best-known answer to readers who preferred the old versions. It is usually linked with his Collected Works of 1908, for which he revised much of his early verse. Though it stands apart from his main collections, it is among his most quoted statements about his craft.
Form
Four lines of four-beat verse in two rhyming couplets ("wrong", "song"; "stake", "remake"). The whole argument is one sentence, and the rhyme of "stake" with "remake" drives its point home.
