Confronting Failure in Yeats Poetry

Failure is an evitable part of life. It comes to us all, at least those of us who try to achieve something in life about ourselves or with ourselves. Depending on how much you have invested in a cause, failure can be so devastating, especially if you had put all your mind and heart into it and you do not have an alternative picture of how things can be. Yet failure opens us up to possibilities we never figured were available for us. This is a key message in William Yeat’s poem titled “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.” Yeats argues that passion is not enough, especially when that passion is directed at a wrong pursuit (Yeats). In this, I mean that passion can only yield the desired results if it is expended on something that one is gifted in.

I once thought of myself as a good actor. I had been in plays in high school, played both minor and major roles to various levels of success. The approbation of my family and friends egged me. I believed with them that I had a thing with acting and if I did the right thing about it my face would one day be on the poster of a blockbuster. I nursed this dream for a long time, and then I met some director in a social gathering and asked her what she thought about my acting skills. She had watched two plays in which I was featured in but she seemed to struggle to remember what roles I had played or even if she saw me on stage. Even after reminding her of the roles and how I looked she still looked unsure and to my disappointment, she remembered clearly roles played by others who didn’t quite sound to me like better actors than myself. Before we parted I asked her what she thought I should do to become a better actor. She told me that I should look for acting classes; that even if I thought I had the talent I needed the skills to make me exceptional in what I did.

I took this advice earnestly and quickly enrolled in acting classes. I remember one of our teachers one day after class telling me that he didn’t think I had a talent in acting. He looked sincere to me even though what he told me broke my heart. I regretted going to him to ask for his opinion about my acting potential. He told me I had done well to enroll for the classes and to specifically ask that question because as a casting director he had a good sense of judgment to tell me I was not cut for acting. But I was too determined to care; I told myself that even experts can be mistaken and that it was a matter of time and I would prove him wrong. I went on undaunted, putting in extra work because I knew that I had to do more than my classmates to whom acting came so easily to them.

After the acting classes, I plunged into a series of auditions, hoping to land myself even a minor role in some play or movie. I kept looking for an opening and spared time to grab any chance that came by. Nothing was forthcoming. Audition after audition the refrain was the same. “We will get back to you” (Yeats, 1989). They never got back to me and so I looked for the next audition. I told myself that it takes a thousand shots at times to hit the target and I had not even taken a hundred of them. In one audition in which I was playing an emotional scene, some blunt casting director told me that I should look for something better to do with my time; that I could not act. I didn’t need them to tell me that they would call me. But this time I didn’t have it in me to fight on. I think the whole exhaustion of that futile journey came crumbling down on me that evening when I was at home in my bed, thinking back at how I had failed at that audition. Until then I had not realized that the series of rejection as these auditions were getting the better of me even though I acted strong, seeking to prove some people wrong. This was a turning point for me.

Looking back, I see myself that “friend” that Yeats is talking about in his poem, whose work has come to nothing (Yeats, 1989). I think you need to be such a good friend to yourself for you to make the most of the failures that are sure to crowd your path. The four opening lines of this poem captures the reality I confronted in the last audition. “Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat, From any brazen throat, for how can you compete” (Yeats, 1989). Yeats urges us to accept defeat when it is inevitable because competing in something we are not gifted in is a futile venture. You may give it to you’re all but the results will be disappointing nonetheless. That was exactly my experience. As Yeats puts it on the ninth and tenth line of this one stanza poem, going on in such a fruitless struggle will make you look like you were bred something else than triumph.

Yeats argues that the logical thing to do is to take failure on the chin and move on with life. Yeats says “be secret” and exultant about it because out of all things that are known this is the most difficult (Yeats, 1989). I concur with Yeats that taking the monumental failure in strides was no mean feat. Erasing the dream of myself as a blockbuster actor was not easy. But what this failure taught me was that I could write better than I can act. I took to jotting down my frustration in a journal as a way of therapy. Then I saw a call out for non-fiction writing based on the theme of failure. I submitted my short story, and I was shortlisted as amongst the best stories out of hundreds that they had received. They called me for a one-month writing residence in which I learned a lot about the craft of writing. The story was anthologized in a publication that climaxed the writing residency. By hindsight, I would not have discovered myself as a writer had I not failed in acting. Therefore, Yeats is right, and every failure should be met with exultation rather than indignation as it reveals to us something significant about ourselves.

References

Yeats, W. B. (1989). To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12882/to-a-friend-whose-work-has-come-to-nothing