Life's Pleasures Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats cuts against the sentimental script that domesticity is a moral upgrade from vice. By stacking “wife and child” beside “drink and harlots,” he isn’t equating love with debauchery so much as exposing how respectable desires can be just as corrosive as taboo ones when they harden into obligation. The verb “destroyed” does the heavy lifting: not “strained” or “worn down,” but annihilated by a craving that looks, from the outside, like virtue.

The real target is the bourgeois idea of “comfort” as a duty. Yeats suggests that the hunger to provide can become a self-consuming engine: men taking on work they hate, compromising their principles, shrinking their ambitions, turning their lives into an endless payment plan for security. “Desire” is telling here, too. This isn’t love’s generosity; it’s appetite, status anxiety, fear of failure, the pressure to perform masculinity as breadwinning. The family becomes less a sanctuary than a mechanism that converts affection into perpetual need.

Context matters: Yeats lived through an Ireland where respectability carried sharp social force and where nationalist, religious, and class expectations policed private life. As a poet who prized vocation and inner freedom, he had reason to distrust any institution that demanded the self be traded for stability. The line’s sting is its inversion: the supposedly clean life can quietly do the dirtiest work on a person, because it recruits honor to justify exhaustion.