A Friend's Illness
Sickness brought me this Thought, in that scale of his: Why should I be dismayed Though flame had burned the whole World, as it were a coal, Now I have seen it weighed Against a soul?
W. B. Yeats
Sickness brought me this Thought, in that scale of his: Why should I be dismayed Though flame had burned the whole World, as it were a coal, Now I have seen it weighed Against a soul?
The speaker begins by saying that a friend’s sickness has brought him a sobering thought. He pictures the illness as a set of scales. On one side, the whole world could burn down to a single coal; he asks why that loss should trouble him now that he has seen the world weighed against a soul.
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