When people quote Yeats, it’s usually ‘The Second Coming’ that gets all the attention. Fair enough. Few poets have written lines that seem to reappear whenever the world feels as though it is coming apart at the seams. It’s either that or TS Eliot describing how the world ends, right?
Don’t get me wrong, by the way – I love both.
Today, though, I find myself returning to a different phrase:
“The fascination of what’s difficult.”
The poem itself isn’t a celebration of difficulty. Quite the opposite.
Yeats is complaining about it. He is tired of bureaucracy, politics, and the endless obstacles that seem to stand between people and the things they care about. Or might care about, if they were given a chance.
Which made me wonder how often we confuse different kinds of difficulty.
Some things are difficult because they are worth wrestling with. A great poem. A challenging idea. A skill that takes years rather than weeks to acquire.
Other things are difficult because someone else has decided they should be.
That’s something I spend my tutoring life fighting. It’s what makes me an ‘Upstart’.
One of the saddest things about literature is that generations of readers have been persuaded that books belong to experts, that meaning is hidden behind technical language, or that interpretation requires permission from someone more qualified.
It doesn’t.
The best teachers don’t remove the difficulty from literature. They remove the unnecessary barriers that prevent people from encountering its real difficulties for themselves.
In my interpretation, that’s the fascination Yeats puts his finger on. Not the attraction of struggle for its own sake, but the discovery that some things become more rewarding the deeper we are willing to engage with them.
Over to you: tell me about a ‘difficult’ text you’ve read which proved to be completely worth it …
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