Ah, the sword uptairs. I have come to understand that not as a symbol of ErrolFlynnical swashbuckling but the evidence of a crusading political agenda. (As in many a present poet's preoccupation with their own fool-driven land.)
Having been often "accused" of having no such involvement, it comforts me to think that Yeats regarded it as a passing phase, one of the seven ages of poesie, so to speak.
And to some extent they are constants, these ages, these stages. I believe that the important thing is to be true to them while they predominate in the life of the poet.
And I believe Yeats did, too. The craft of verse, as he calls it, without a reason to be undertaken, is in itself an unresponsive fish. It goes belly-up without its reasons. As he himself wrote in his diary "one can never have too many reasons for doing what is so laborious".
Interestingly, he wrote that while he was still regarding every poem he produced as a way of explaining himself to The Face, but the truth of it persists, as does the poetry of that stage in his work.
Me, I'm in this for the long game. But I like to think that when they bear me out in a box and dare to look upstairs, they'll find that sword, well-oiled and wrapped in silk.
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