All Things Can Tempt Me - Analysis

A confession that praise and distraction share the same door

This poem’s central claim is blunt and a little bleak: the same sensitivity that makes a poet able to write also makes him easy to pull away from writing. The opening line, All things can tempt me, doesn’t sound like flirtation so much as fatigue. Temptation here isn’t only sexual or glamorous; it’s anything that promises to relieve the burden of paying attention. Yeats begins by admitting that the poet’s mind is porous—available to faces, politics, moods, and impulses—and that poetry has to compete with all of it.

From woman to nation: the poet’s mind as a distracted public square

Yeats names two earlier temptations in quick succession: a woman’s face and The seeming needs of his fool-driven land. The phrase or worse is doing a lot of work. It suggests that the nation’s demands can be a more consuming seduction than desire—more righteous, more noisy, harder to refuse. Calling those needs seeming doesn’t deny that Ireland suffers; it implies that what presents itself as necessity can be a kind of performance that recruits the poet’s conscience. The speaker sounds like someone who has been asked to turn his craft into a public service, and who suspects that the request often comes dressed as emergency.

The hinge: when craft becomes accustomed toil

The poem turns on a quiet shift: Now nothing but comes readier to his hand Than this accustomed toil. Temptation used to be an interruption; now the work is the most immediate thing available. But Yeats doesn’t present this as triumph. Accustomed and toil make writing sound like repetitive labor rather than inspiration. The speaker has learned the motions, and that competence is double-edged: it rescues him from distraction, yet it also drains the work of its earlier romance. The tone here is not celebratory mastery; it’s the resignation of someone who can do the job even when he doesn’t feel like a “poet” anymore.

Young Yeats wanted a singer with a sword

When he looks back—When I was young—he describes a younger self who scorned mere song. He had not given a penny for it unless the poet sang with such airs that listeners imagined a sword upstairs. That vivid, almost comic detail exposes the hunger for theatrical authority: the poet had to seem dangerous, ready, armed. It’s easy to hear in this the era’s craving for heroic art—art that could pass as action. Yeats, an Irish poet often entangled with cultural nationalism, compresses that whole fantasy into the image of a sword kept conveniently above the music, as if art needs the guarantee of violence to be taken seriously.

Old Yeats would rather be a fish

The ending is the poem’s coldest irony. After admitting he once demanded swagger and implied power, he confesses that now—could I but have my wish—he’d be Colder and dumber and deafer than a fish. The line doesn’t merely express modesty; it expresses envy of numbness. A fish is untouched by praise, insult, patriotism, lust, and the constant tug of “seeming needs.” The contradiction is sharp: the poet’s gift depends on responsiveness, yet the speaker longs to be less responsive than any human can be. He wants the peace of not hearing the world that keeps pulling him away from the page.

The hard question hiding in the joke

If the young speaker required a poet to sound like he had a sword, and the older speaker wishes to be deafer than a fish, what does that leave poetry to be—neither weapon nor consolation? The poem suggests a grim possibility: that the poet’s truest “temptation” is not sex or politics but the desire to stop feeling, because feeling is the condition of the craft and also its torment.