"The painful, highly personal question raised by Yeats is: if the poet's physical powers fail, if his vision and hearing are impaired, can the memory of the sensory world serve as a basis for poetry? Is memory alone capable of stimulating the creative act? ... As he draws upon his memory, revisiting scenes both in his life and works, he comes to respond affirmatively to the pessimistic question first raised ... The poet's physical impairments, paradoxically, prove a blessing. Indeed, in the stanza from which Beckett derived his title, Yeats puts the real world in perspective, thereby reducing his own sense of loss." In a personal communication Beckett told Eoin O'Brien that this was one of Yeats's greatest lines.