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.
