Yeats' poetry is organic, earthy, and filled with concrete detail that
invigorates his message with life. This poem
is about work. The title
is a reference to the curse placed on Adam (and all his posterity) in
the book of Genesis where the ground is cursed: "in toil you will eat
of it all the days of your life...by the sweat of your face you will
eat bread." Yeats communicates through this poem that all things
require work to be accomplished well, specifically poetry, beauty and
love.
The poem
addresses each of these items separately. The second stanza
illustrates the poet's view on writing, recognizing the response from
so much of the world toward what they think is an idle trade. The third
stanza addresses beauty, spoken by a
woman in the conversation, and the
poet then speaks about love. He seems to release some frustration about
the present condition of romance in the world, nostalgic of the days of
courtly lovers, romantic knights, and old ceremony and tradition. He
seems saddened that these ideals are now gone, that people give so
little for love.
The last two stanzas are the poet's application of this. Yeats is
probably speaking at the end of the poem to Maude Gonne, the woman he
spent his life loving, who never returned his love. He talks about the
moon, a typical symbol of love, as a shell--worn and wasted. Yeats
sought to love her in the "old highway of love," yet it had not yielded
the fruit of his labor.