My favourite WB Yeats poem: Joseph O’Connor on 'Politics'

Why Joseph O’Connor chose this poem

Yeats’s uncharacteristically self-deprecating and even gently funny poem Politics (1939) is far from his greatest achievement, but it’s hesitantly cognisant of human frailty in ways I find endearing and oddly touching. It’s a late poem, perhaps his last. He loved being on the stage of public discourse, but this time he’s off it, a bit bored by fine speeches. He trusts us enough to drop his mask. It has something of the charm of The Beatles’ I Saw Her Standing There, a tender little admission of a moment that stirs recognition. And I adore that final, pouting exclamation mark: “But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms!” It’s a rare, lovely twinkling, Yeats with tongue in cheek.

Joseph O’Connor is McCourt professor of creative writing at the University of Limerick. He will give the opening address at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo in August

Politics

‘In our time the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms.’ –

Thomas Mann

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics,

Yet here’s a travelled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there’s a politician

That has read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war’s alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms.