Life's Pleasures Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats lands the punchline like a man who’s watched too many respectable faces turn venomous in daylight. The line pretends to be a joke about drinking, but it’s really an indictment of character: intoxication isn’t the problem; sobriety is. The “worst thing” isn’t that some men lose control when drunk - it’s that when they return to themselves, the self they return to is still ugly. Drink becomes an alibi that Yeats refuses to grant.

The construction is slyly circular: drunk/sober, sober/drunk. It traps the subject in a binary where neither state offers relief. That’s the wit - a neat inversion of the usual moral lecture - and it also smuggles in Yeats’s darker suspicion that society’s real brutality often arrives clean-shaven and clear-eyed. The target is a certain masculine type: pious, punitive, self-satisfied, using “sobriety” as a synonym for virtue while practicing cruelty, hypocrisy, or small-mindedness with perfect lucidity.

Context matters because Yeats lived amid Irish cultural nationalism, political upheaval, and public moralizing; he knew how quickly lofty rhetoric can harden into resentful policing. Read against that backdrop, the line is less pub banter than cultural diagnosis: some men don’t need drink to become dangerous or tedious - their default setting is already corrosive. It’s a warning about mistaking composure for goodness, and a reminder that vice can look like discipline.