Forged Greatness Before the Iron Was Hot

W.B. Yeats once said, “Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.”

There’s a kind of truth in those words that doesn’t sparkle — it burns. Yeats wasn’t offering advice on decorating a greeting card. He was reaching deep into what it takes to move forward when the conditions aren’t favorable, when the warmth hasn’t come, and the way forward looks like work instead of welcome.

William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865. His father painted portraits and held fast to his ideals, even if they didn’t pay the bills. The family had more ideas than income and moved often, living between England and Ireland, searching for footing. There were books, arguments, and plenty of questions about what mattered. That mix — rootless and thoughtful — shaped the boy who would later shape the language of a country.

By the time he was twenty, Yeats had started writing poetry. His early poems were filled with myths and dreams, soft light and quiet longing. They weren’t yet what they’d become. But he wrote them anyway. That was his way — strike first, and trust the heat would come.

One of the defining figures in Yeats’s life was Maud Gonne, an Irish revolutionary and actress with strong opinions and a will to match. Yeats fell deeply in love with her. He proposed several times. She refused…