It is easy for the average Journal reader of a certain age to turn his/her thoughts to fit the images to persons of his/her own acquaintance from the past. That’s how I read this poem!  Like Yeats I identified myself with the mad old man!

Why should not old men be mad?

Some have known a likely lad

That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist

Turn to a drunken journalist;

A girl that knew all Dante once

Live to bear children to a dunce;

A Helen of social welfare dream,

Climb on a wagonette to scream.

Some think it a matter of course that chance

Should starve good men and bad advance,

That if their neighbours figured plain,

As though upon a lighted screen,

No single story would they find

Of any unbroken happy mind,

A finish worthy of the start.

Young men know nothing of this sort,

Observant old men know it well;

And when they know what old books tell,

And that no better can be had,

Know why an old man should be mad.