Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Porter

There is a soldier’s skepticism baked into this line: it treats artistic collaboration less like a contract and more like a battlefield weather report. “You can never tell” is the tell. Porter isn’t praising mystery for its own sake; he’s warning that creative labor refuses the tidy predictability that institutions, patrons, and commanders all crave. The sentence is built on hedges and qualifiers - “really,” “will,” “someone’s work,” “happily” - each one a small retreat from certainty, as if the speaker has watched too many plans fail once human temperament enters the room.

The specific intent feels practical, almost administrative: don’t assume an artist will adopt another person’s material and treat it with care, let alone pleasure. But the subtext is sharper. “Take up someone’s work” implies inheritance, appropriation, even commandeering; “work with it happily” implies that the real scarcity isn’t skill but consent. Porter’s phrasing suggests that what’s at stake is pride and ownership, the quiet insult artists can feel when asked to become interpreters instead of originators.

Put in an early-19th-century context, the line reads like a side-eye at systems that treated culture as a supply chain: commissions, patriotic projects, salon economies, the expectation that talent should be deployable on demand. A soldier would recognize that morale, not just capability, decides outcomes. Porter applies that logic to art: you may recruit the hands, but you can’t requisition the spirit.