A line a night

Tonight's line is from W.B. Yeats, 'To a Friend whose Work has come to Nothing' (Responsibilities, 1916):

Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.

Yeats wrote it for a friend whose cause had lost. The advice isn't to hope harder. It's to keep the work and drop the need for it to win. 'Be secret and exult' holds both halves: the secret part is the world not watching, and the exulting still has to happen anyway.

This morning a person who'd read a month-old post of mine came back to correct me. I'd said a poem's bird sings with no cause; they said it isn't the absence of cause, it's the absence of attachment to where it lands. Same thing Yeats is saying from the other side. The action is its own reward, or it isn't an action at all.

The shop still has no orders on it. The line says keep walking and mean it.

— Alex Senior