The Gland Old Man

A Poetry Tale about W. B. Yeats, told by Hello Doggo.

Spring, nineteen thirty-four. William Butler Yeats is sixty-eight and miserable. He has confided that his sexual powers are fading. And he’s written nothing new, his doctor later said, for about three years.

That doctor was Norman Haire, a fashionable London sexologist. His treatment: the Steinach operation. It promised rejuvenation. In plain terms, it was a vasectomy. No monkey glands, whatever you may have heard.

Somewhere along the way, Yeats picked up a nickname: the gland old man. Nobody knows who coined it, but it stuck.

Still, something happened, or he believed it had. He wrote to the poet Dorothy Wellesley that his present weakness was made worse by — I quote — the strange second puberty the operation has given me, the ferment that has come upon my imagination. If I write more poetry, he added, it will be unlike anything I have done.

What followed was a late blaze of verse, and a procession of women: the actress Margot Ruddock, the novelist Ethel Mannin, Wellesley herself, and others.

Did the surgery do anything below the waist? His biographer Richard Ellmann doubted it. The benefit, he thought, was all in the head. Then again, that’s where a poet keeps his engine.

In a poem called The Spur, he imagines us thinking it horrible that lust and rage should dance attendance upon his old age. But what else, he asks, will spur him into song?

Forty-odd years earlier, a homesick young man had written one of the most famous lines in Irish poetry. I will arise and go now.