Some of you remember that at the end of his life,
William Butler Yeats had an operation called the Steinach
Operation in which he was injected with monkey glands.
And he was convinced that this improved his sex
life in his old age.
Nevertheless, there are a number of poems
that he wrote in old age in which
the image of the limp worm keeps appearing.
[LAUGHTER]
And I'm just-- this next poem is a kind of meditation
on those two seemingly contradictory bits
of information.
"Monkey glands, monkey glands, William Yeats, balladeer,
how can you stiffen old meters to curse?
Speaking syntactically septuagenarians
tumbled like limp worms from bed in diverse."
[FEEBLE LAUGHTER]