Please help me understand a poem by W. B. Yeats

Question

The poem in question is 'The Choice':

The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

I understand the gist of it but the lines 6 and 7 confuse me (non-native speaker). I am not asking for interpretations per se but rather a simpler wording? Thank you

Answer 1

A re-rendering of the two lines might be:

In luck or out the toil has left its mark:

Whether you are fortunate or unfortunate there will be negative consequences of what you do. Those are:

That old perplexity an empty purse

The long-standing problem of not having any money. (Perplexity means entanglement or obstacle here, not confusion.)

Note that the last line is closely related to the next-to-last, and gives the alternative negative consequence.

Answer 2

Yates introduces the choice between "Perfection of the life" and "the work."

Lines 6 says "toil has left its mark," so if you choose a life of toil ("the work") you will be scarred by it.

Line 7 says "That old perplexity an empty purse." Even as you choose the life of toil you may have nothing to show for it but "an empty purse." And that is perplexing.

Answer 3

Yeats is addressing a question raised 2200 years earlier in the Bible in the Book of Ecclesiastes

Ec:1:2: “Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” (In the earlier versions it is “Ec:1:2: Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” And the word vanity is repeated in the final line of the poem.)

Ec:1:14: I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

Ec:2:1: I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless.

Ec:2:2 “Laughter,” I said, “is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?

Ec:2:11: Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.

Ec:2:16 For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered; the days have already come when both have been forgotten. Like the fool, the wise too must die!

but the question was probably asked many times before that. “What is the point of life, when we know it will not be easy and will end in death and we will be forgotten?”

In short, Yeats (and the writer of Ecclesiastes) says that whether you chose to spend your looking for wisdom, in enjoying yourself, or you decide to become rich by hard work – at the end you will realise that life is meaningless.

The intellect of man is forced to choose the choice must be made between

perfection of the life, or of the work, spending you life in the pursuit of wisdom and happiness or dedicating yourself to work/ambition.

And if it [the intellect] take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

If the ambition is chosen, there will be no peace and tranquilly, only angry and impotent regret

When all that story's finished, what's the news? At the point of death, what can we conclude?

In luck or out the toil has left its mark: Whether you have been fortunate or not, the effort involved in either choice has scarred and damaged you

That old perplexity an empty purse, That eternal question contains no answers

Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse. nor did it hold the meaninglessness of your life, which ends in regret.

Answer 4

You asked for the meaning of the English words, not the interpretation of the poem. Unfortunately, the meaning of the English words may depend on the overall interpretation of the poem. Here is what I would say for the English words:

In luck or out,

Lucky or unlucky, or maybe successful or unsuccessful,

the toil has left its mark,

the toil has had a negative effect on the toiler.

The old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

A perplexity can be a difficult question. My interpretation is that this perplexity is: which to choose, an empty purse, or vanity and remorse (this is of course refers back to the title of the poem, and to its first two lines).