"I balanced all, brought all to mind, the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death"
About this Quote
A ledger book opens in the mind, and Yeats starts auditing his own existence with the cold clarity of someone who suspects the numbers won’t add up. “I balanced all” sounds almost managerial, but that’s the point: he drags the messy material of love, ambition, art, and aging into the sterile language of accounts. The chilling twist is that the calculation doesn’t produce wisdom or comfort. It produces “waste of breath” on both sides of the timeline. Past and future collapse into the same verdict: vanity, futility, talk.
What makes the passage work is the brutal compression of time into a single moment of judgment, “in balance with this life, this death.” The phrase doesn’t just juxtapose life and death; it implies they’re being weighed like equal commodities. Yeats isn’t offering a romantic sigh at mortality. He’s dramatizing a crisis of value: if the years behind and the years to come are both air, then meaning has to be located elsewhere - not in duration, not in narrative progress, not in the comforting arc of “it all leads somewhere.”
Context matters because Yeats wrote as a man watching worlds end and begin: the twilight of empire, Irish revolution, the mechanized brutality of modern Europe, the personal shock of the aging body. Late Yeats is obsessed with reckoning - what art can redeem, what desire can justify, what remains when ideals harden into history. The subtext is a dare: if breath is cheap, what, exactly, is worth saying?
What makes the passage work is the brutal compression of time into a single moment of judgment, “in balance with this life, this death.” The phrase doesn’t just juxtapose life and death; it implies they’re being weighed like equal commodities. Yeats isn’t offering a romantic sigh at mortality. He’s dramatizing a crisis of value: if the years behind and the years to come are both air, then meaning has to be located elsewhere - not in duration, not in narrative progress, not in the comforting arc of “it all leads somewhere.”
Context matters because Yeats wrote as a man watching worlds end and begin: the twilight of empire, Irish revolution, the mechanized brutality of modern Europe, the personal shock of the aging body. Late Yeats is obsessed with reckoning - what art can redeem, what desire can justify, what remains when ideals harden into history. The subtext is a dare: if breath is cheap, what, exactly, is worth saying?
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
|---|---|
| Source | "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" — W. B. Yeats, 1919; stanza 4 (lines 13–16) contains the cited lines. |
More Quotes by William
Add to List
