Success Quote by William Butler Yeats

Oxford gets rendered here less as a university than as a seductive aesthetic event, the kind Yeats both craved and mistrusted. The line is a compliment that behaves like a warning. By saying he “wonder[s] anybody does anything” but “dream and remember,” Yeats praises the place for its beauty while quietly suggesting that beauty can be narcotic: it invites reverie over rigor, mood over method, myth over measurable work. That’s a very Yeatsian tension - the artist enthralled by grandeur, yet alert to how grandeur can anesthetize action.

“Dream and remember” is doing double duty. Dreaming signals creative possibility, the mind unshackled; remembering signals tradition, inheritance, the weight of the past. Oxford, in his gaze, is a machine that manufactures both: it romanticizes the present by making it feel already historical. The campus becomes a kind of time-traveling stage set, where even ordinary speech feels underpowered.

The leap to music - “One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking” - is not just whimsical. Singing implies performance, ritual, heightened emotion, a social script written in melody rather than argument. That’s the subtext: in a place that polished, people risk becoming characters in a cultural pageant, carrying the institution’s aura more than their own ideas.

Calling it “all like an opera” lands with sly precision. Opera is overwhelming, lavish, built to make you feel. It’s also famously impractical: gorgeous excess, emotion so amplified it becomes unreal. Yeats is naming Oxford’s spell, and hinting at its cost.