Nature & Animals Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats lands a whole theory of power in one nasty, comic image: the dog never thanks the fleas. It’s a line that refuses the sentimental story the exploited are often asked to tell about their exploiters. The flea is tiny, almost ridiculous, but it still feeds; the dog is bigger, stronger, and still stuck scratching. That imbalance is the point. Yeats isn’t just being witty. He’s mocking the expectation of gratitude from those who take.

The subtext is political and psychological. “Praise” is the giveaway: this isn’t about irritation, it’s about ideological submission. A flea doesn’t merely bite; it normalizes the bite by demanding it be reframed as a favor, a lesson, a source of character. Yeats’s question implies an answer so obvious it becomes an indictment: no creature celebrates its own parasite unless it’s been trained, threatened, or seduced into confusing dependence with devotion.

Context matters because Yeats is a poet of quarrels with nation, movement, and self. Writing in and around the pressures of Irish cultural nationalism, revolution, and the subsequent disappointments of governance and faction, he repeatedly targets slogans that flatter the public into compliance. The line reads like a jab at patrons, politicians, institutions, even lovers who want credit for what they’ve extracted. Its genius is how it stays elastic: it can be about colonial rule, about class hierarchy, about the artist expected to thank the market. Yeats lets the disgust do the persuasion.