Time & Perspective Quote by William Butler Yeats

Perfectionism, for Yeats, isn’t fussiness; it’s a kind of deception practiced in good faith. The line that “will take us hours maybe” must arrive wearing the lightness of improvisation, “a moment’s thought,” or else the labor shows like bad tailoring. That last image - “stitching and unstitching” - is doing double duty: it’s craft-talk made vivid, and it’s a quiet rebuke to anyone who thinks poetry is just inspiration taking dictation. Yeats insists on revision as a moral discipline: the work is “naught” if it can’t metabolize its own sweat.

The subtext is anxiety about artifice. Yeats came up in a moment when Romantic ideas of the natural genius still haunted the room, even as modernity demanded sharper technique and harder surfaces. He’s threading that needle: the poem must feel inevitable, not engineered. The “yet” is the pivot between two economies - time spent versus time perceived. A reader should experience grace, not grind; the poet must hide the seams.

Context matters, too: Yeats spent a lifetime revising, often radically, and he watched Irish cultural nationalism, occult systems, and modernist austerity compete for authority. This couplet reads like a private workshop credo forged under public pressure: if you can’t make the made thing feel unmade, you haven’t earned the line. Effort isn’t the point; transmuted effort is.