The Living Beauty

by W. B. Yeats

I’ll say and maybe dream I have drawn content–

Seeing that time has frozen up the blood,

The wick of youth being burned and the oil spent–

From beauty that is cast out of a mould

In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,

Appears, but when we have gone is gone again,

Being more indifferent to our solitude

Than ’twere an apparition. O heart, we are old,

The living beauty is for younger men,

We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

 

 

 

“The Living Beauty” is believed to have been inspired by Iseult Gonne, the daughter of Yeats’s famed muse Maud Gonne–Iseult herself having become his muse as well.

William Butler Yeats was born on June 13, 1865, in Sandymount, Ireland. A towering figure in modern English poetry, Yeats is also a major cultural symbol of Ireland, where he served two terms as senator. He died in 1939