Life & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

A “little bag of dreams” sounds quaint until Yeats turns it into a trap. The line begins with a grudging permission: “Take, if you must,” a phrase that carries the weary fatalism of someone who knows persuasion won’t work. Yeats isn’t offering a gift so much as conceding that the other person is going to reach for illusion anyway. The bag is “little,” almost dismissible, but its contents aren’t; dreams compress and travel well, like contraband.

Then he shifts from possession to consequence. “Unloose the cord” is a tiny, intimate action - the sort of casual untying that feels harmless. Yeats makes that gesture the pivot between control and captivity. Once loosened, the dreams don’t spill out; they “wrap you round.” That verb is the genius of the threat: it’s tactile, enveloping, almost tender. Yeats understands that fantasies rarely arrive as blunt self-destruction. They seduce with softness, with a sense of being held, until the embrace becomes restraint.

Contextually, this fits the Yeats who spent his career circling the dangerous glamour of idealism - romantic, nationalist, erotic, artistic. Ireland’s revolutionary mythmaking, his own longing for Maud Gonne, his fascination with occult systems: all are versions of dream-bags tied shut for a reason. The subtext is a warning from someone who both distrusts dreams and cannot stop writing them. He’s not anti-imagination; he’s suspicious of the moment imagination stops being a lens and starts being a leash.