The Witch

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1914from Responsibilities8 lines

Toil, and grow rich,What’s that but to lieWith a foul witchAnd after, drained dry,To be broughtTo the chamber whereLies one long soughtWith despair.

Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.

In brief

Summary

Getting rich is pictured as lying with a foul witch.

An eight-line riddle about money. To "Toil, and grow rich" is, the poet says, nothing but to lie "With a foul witch", and afterwards, "drained dry", to be brought to the room where "one long sought" lies waiting. The worker for money wears himself out with the wrong partner, and only when he is spent does he come to the one he truly wanted, sought "With despair". The grim little fable judges a whole way of living in a few words.

Lines to remember

Toil, and grow rich,

With a foul witch

Line by line

Lines 1 to 4The foul witch
"Toil, and grow rich" sounds like good advice until the next lines define it as lying "With a foul witch". Wealth becomes a seductive, ugly partner who leaves the toiler "drained dry", exhausted in body and spirit.
Lines 5 to 8Too late
Only then is he "brought / To the chamber where / Lies one long sought / With despair". The true beloved has been waiting all along, but he comes to her spent. The last two words make the long search hopeless.

Themes

Money

The poem treats the pursuit of wealth as a kind of corruption. "Toil, and grow rich" is reduced to a sexual image of lying "With a foul witch", which is at once disgusting and draining. It belongs with the other poems in Responsibilities that scorn a life spent getting and saving.

Wasted desire

The "one long sought" is never named. She may be a real beloved, or an ideal such as beauty or art. Either way, the man reaches her only after the witch has "drained" him "dry", so the thing he most wanted comes to him when he has nothing left to give. "With despair" closes the poem on that loss.

Context

"The Witch" was collected in Responsibilities (Cuala Press, 1914), where it is followed by "The Peacock", another short poem setting the pursuit of riches against a life of pride and imagination. Much of the book attacks what Yeats saw as the money-minded spirit of the Ireland of his day.

Form

Eight very short lines of two or three beats, rhyming ABABCDCD ("rich", "lie", "witch", "dry"; "brought", "where", "sought", "despair"). The whole poem is one sentence, a question ("What's that but") that answers itself. The clipped lines give it the terse, riddling sound of a curse or proverb.