From time to time, I put down my duties of writing about politics and other human follies and pick up a book, often a book of poetry, often by W.B. Yeats. The other night I read Yeats’ poem “The Fiddler of Dooney.” It is a little masterpiece, but then Yeats wrote so many masterpieces. It begins:

And on it dances for a few more stanzas, delighting the eye and the ear and the mind. Yeats obviously chose each word with the utmost care and gave his words a structure that was finely disciplined — good show W.B.!