Love & Passion Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats lands the line with the cool hauteur of someone who’s spent too long in drawing rooms full of “serious” people performing seriousness. By naming sex and the dead as the only subjects fit for a “serious and studious mood,” he’s not confessing a private obsession so much as puncturing a whole cultural pose: the idea that refined intellect should concern itself with safe abstractions. He drags the conversation back to the two experiences that no amount of education can domesticate.

The pairing is doing double work. Sex is the intrusion of the body, appetite, and humiliation into our self-myths; the dead are the intrusion of time, loss, and judgment. Put together, they form a blunt ontology: what drives us, what ends us. Yeats also understood both as engines of art. Desire produces drama, jealousy, power plays, and lyric need; death produces memory, elegy, nationalism’s graveyard rhetoric, and the occult itch to make the past speak. His “still of opinion” reads like an older man reaffirming a heresy against polite literary talk, which often treats eros as vulgar and death as too morbid. He insists they’re not only allowable but central.

Context matters: Yeats is a poet steeped in fin-de-siecle decadence, Irish political upheaval, and late-life metaphysics. He watched ideals collide with flesh, and revolution harden into martyrs. The subtext is a warning to the “studious” mind: if your seriousness can’t handle sex and death, it’s not seriousness at all - it’s avoidance dressed up as taste.