Here in Yeats Week, in honor of William Butler Yeats’s June 13 birthday, the Sun has noted the different modes of Yeats’s work, the different masks he would assume: the romantic poet, the pre-Raphaelite poet, and even the political poet. There’s yet another Yeats worth noting — the knowing one, maybe even too knowing, gazing down on young and old alike. In “The Scholars,” from his 1919 book “The Wild Swans at Coole,” Yeats gives a 12-line tetrameter poem, rhymed ababcc–dedeff, that mildly mocks old scholars for their pedantry in editing the Latin lines of young poets: Lord, what would they say / Did their Catullus walk that way? And even sneers a little at those young poets who Rhymed out in love’s despair / To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

The Scholars
by William Butler Yeats

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?