Analysis of The Fascination of What's Difficult by William Butler Yeats

The Fascination of What’s Difficult

By William Butler Yeats

 

The fascination of what's difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent

Spontaneous joy and natural content

Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt

That must, as if it had not holy blood

Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,

Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt

As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays

That have to be set up in fifty ways,

On the day's war with every knave and dolt,

Theatre business, management of men.

I swear before the dawn comes round again

I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt. 

The poem begins with a title drop.  The first line is also the title of the poem.   This is by no means a modern convention but is associated with a lot of modern poetry.  

The second line mentions that this fascination has dried the sap out of his veins.  Foregoing the enjambment that carries the same meaning, there's the sentiment that the vitality of the narrator is diminished by this fascination of his.  The third line which is part of an enjambement with the second laments the lack of spontaneity and the foregoing joy that is a part of it.  The rent here is as rendering or cutting apart. The natural content is the happiness that comes naturally and without excess artifice.  The continuous use of enjambment is perhaps ironic in it's artifice in expressing the poets frustration with necessary difficulty.  That is, the difficulty of modern poetry.  Yeats lived and worked during a period in which Romanticism was transitioning into modernism and there may be hints of the pain of adapting to the new paradigm.  

The poem goes on  to say that there is something of a sickness to our colt.  The following lines will characterize the colt as a being that might have the capacity to leap from cloud to cloud, as a pegasus might.  The characterization of aesthetic works might at one hand be likened to a pegasus ,but the narration characterizes it more as a horse carrying road metal.  It's possible that Yeats may be characterizing Romanticism as a pegasus, and the more modern movement as a horse designated to work and pull road metal, straining under the lash and sweat of the task.  

The poet then goes on to curse plays and the multiplicity of them.  Having to figure out every angle and the particulars of each part.  It may be that Yeats is simply criticizing the fact that directing plays and larger productions saps the life from the artist.  As Yeats was well known for his poetry, he was also a prolific dramatist of the stage.  He'll go on to criticize the theater in more depth.  

Here in the eleventh line the narration expresses an iconoclastic attitude to people, complaining of the little things that sap the life from him.  The poem ends on an upbeat in that the narrator makes an oath before the dawn returns that he'll "find the stable and pull out the bolt"  Here we can see that he's referring again to the colt that can be either pegasus or a horse laden with burdens.  The narrator vows again that before the next day comes around he'll engage in the creative process again, in order to let the horse fly.