Faith & Spirit Quote by William Butler Yeats

Old age, for Yeats, isn’t dignified by default; it’s a humiliation unless the inner life stages a revolt. The image is cruelly physical: the “tattered coat upon a stick” reduces the elderly body to a shabby prop, a scarecrow of former vitality. It’s not just fear of decline but disgust at how society reads decline as emptiness. Yeats answers with a counter-command that’s almost percussive: “unless soul clap its hands and sing.” The soul doesn’t merely endure; it performs, loudly, insistently, turning fraying flesh into a reason for greater music.

The line’s power sits in its double edge. On one level it’s self-exhortation, the poet coaching himself against despair. On another it’s a rebuke to any culture that treats aging as a slow disappearance from relevance. Yeats makes the body’s decay undeniable, then refuses to let it be the final meaning. The “mortal dress” is a brilliant demotion: flesh is just clothing, temporary and increasingly ill-fitting. What matters is the thing wearing it, and how fiercely it can still make art, prayer, or praise.

Context sharpens the urgency. Yeats wrote these lines in “Sailing to Byzantium,” a late-career poem obsessed with what art can salvage when time is stripping you down. Byzantium becomes a fantasy of permanence, not as vanity, but as an escape from the body’s verdict. The louder singing “for every tatter” is the whole thesis: the more the world marks you as finished, the more ferociously you must insist on an interior life that isn’t.