Are You Content - Analysis

A courtroom of relatives, and a verdict he can’t reach

The poem reads like an old man staging his own trial and discovering he can’t serve as judge. Yeats calls in an entire clan—son, grandson, great-grandson, uncles, aunts—and asks them To judge what I have done. The central worry is blunt: he has turned inheritance into language, and he fears that in doing so he may have ruined it. The phrase put it into words carries both pride and suspicion: writing is his life’s act, but also a kind of meddling. That’s why the poem ends each section with the same dissatisfied refrain: he is not content, not because he has done nothing, but because he can’t be sure what his doing has cost.

Spoilt what old loins have sent: art as damage, not preservation

The poem’s sharpest tension is between lineage as something physical and wordless and the poet’s urge to translate it. Old loins suggests raw biological continuity—sex, blood, unchosen inheritance—while put it into words suggests selection, shaping, maybe even falsification. He imagines that only the dead can judge fairly: Eyes spiritualised by death. That line is not comfort; it is a removal of the verdict to a realm he can’t access. The speaker’s admission—I cannot—is both humility and punishment: he must live with uncertainty, and uncertainty keeps him restless.

The roll call: turning family history into myth, and doubting the right

Much of the poem is a catalogue of figures whose vividness feels half historical, half legendary: the one who Set up the old stone Cross at Drumcliff; the red-headed rector in County Down; the Sandymount Corbets; Old William pollexfen; The smuggler Middleton; and Butlers far back who are already Half legendary men. This roll call is affectionate but not cozy. By naming them so specifically, Yeats both honors them and admits he has been the one to make them into a story. The poem keeps asking: when you turn people into emblematic characters—rector, smuggler, notable man—are you preserving them, or simplifying them into a usable personal mythology?

A retirement fantasy he refuses to believe

The last stanza shifts from ancestry to the speaker’s immediate future: Infirm and aged, he imagines he might stay / In some good company, Smiling at the sea. Even this seems slightly evasive—an old man picturing a gentler ending. Then comes a cutting self-portrait that refuses to romanticize him: I who have always hated work. The confession destabilizes the idyllic image. It hints that his discontent is not merely lofty artistic angst; it is also irritation with himself, with his own temperament, with the difficulty of sustaining effort without resenting it. Contentment would require a kind of settled character he’s not sure he has.

Browning’s gods: the desire for a last, impossible conversation

The poem’s final reach is toward something beyond family and beyond leisure: to demonstrate in his life what Robert Browning meant by an old hunter talking with Gods. This is a yearning for a culminating encounter—late-life meaning that feels earned, direct, almost mythic. But the word demonstrate is telling: he wants proof, not mere hope. That craving for proof clashes with the poem’s earlier insistence that only death can spiritualize the eyes enough to judge. He wants, while still alive, the kind of certainty he has already declared unavailable. So the repeated ending—But I am not content—sounds less like complaint than like a refusal to settle for anything short of a final, validating vision.

What if the poem’s discontent is the inheritance?

He lists a rector, a cross-builder, a smuggler, half legendary men, then imagines himself aging by the sea—and none of it stills him. The unsettling possibility the poem hints at is that restlessness is what has been handed down, as much as names and places. If so, his fear of having Spoilt the inheritance by writing it may be backwards: maybe the writing is the truest continuation of what his people sent, precisely because it cannot be content.