Life & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

Memory is doing political work here, not sentimental work. Yeats opens by yoking “cast your mind” to “other days,” a phrase that sounds like a casual invitation to reminisce until you feel the pressure behind it: he’s drafting the past as a tool for survival. This is an Irish poet writing in the long hangover of empire and the convulsions of nation-building, when history isn’t background noise but ammunition. To “cast” the mind is almost to throw it forward and back at once, a deliberate act of mental discipline. Nostalgia, in Yeats’s hands, is a training regimen.

The line’s engine is its hinge between “other days” and “coming days.” Yeats isn’t asking Ireland to live in a museum; he’s warning that the future will test whether the national story has any spine. “May be still” carries anxiety. Indomitability is not assumed, it’s precarious, something that can be lost through forgetfulness, complacency, or internal fracture. The phrase “indomitable Irishry” is tellingly strange: not “Ireland,” not even “the Irish,” but “Irishry,” a collective identity that feels half-mythic, half-made-up. It’s both rallying cry and self-conscious invention, Yeats admitting that national character is a performance that must be continuously rehearsed.

Subtextually, he’s also policing what kind of remembering counts. “Other days” implies selective curation: the heroic, the sacrificial, the legend-ready. Yeats’s genius is that he makes that selectiveness sound like destiny. The line works because it flatters and alarms at the same time, offering pride as a kind of protective magic - then hinting it only works if you keep believing.