Aging & Wisdom Quote by William Butler Yeats

Yeats snaps the gates of human experience down to two blunt entry points: the mouth and the eye. Wine is literal ingestion, pleasure you can swallow and measure; love is vision, a kind of intoxication that happens at a distance, before touch, before knowledge. It’s a neat, almost ruthless symmetry, and it’s doing more than flirting with cliché. Yeats is staging desire as a sensory ambush: we don’t reason our way into either appetite, we absorb it.

The subtext is a quietly fatalistic anthropology. “That’s all we shall know for truth” doesn’t flatter the mind; it demotes philosophy to an afterthought. Truth, in this frame, is not a proposition you can prove but a compulsion you can’t outgrow. The line “Before we grow old and die” lands like a curtain drop, yoking romance and drinking to the same endpoint: mortality. Yeats isn’t romanticizing hedonism so much as admitting its primacy. Our most reliable certainties are bodily, and the body has an expiration date.

Context matters: Yeats, writing in a culture steeped in lyric tradition, borrows the singsong simplicity of folk wisdom and turns it into something sharper. He lived through the late-Victorian hangover, Irish political upheaval, and a modernist crisis of belief; skepticism about “truth” wasn’t theoretical. The poem’s strategy is to sound timeless while smuggling in modern doubt: if love starts at the eye, it’s also vulnerable to illusion, projection, the beautiful lie. That’s the bite beneath the music.