And I though never of Ledaean kind Had pretty plumage once — enough of that, Better to smile on all that smile, and show There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow. What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap Honey of generation had betrayed, And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape As recollection or the drug decide, Would think her Son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays Upon a ghostly paradigm of things; Solider Aristotle played the taws Upon the bottom of a king of kings; World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard: Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? Plato thought nature but a spume that plays. Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;. Solider Aristotle played the taws.
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;. World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras. Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings. What a star sang and careless Muses heard:. Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird. Both nuns and mothers worship images,. But those the candles light are not as those. That animate a mother's reveries,. But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts—O Presences. That passion, piety or affection knows,. And that all heavenly glory symbolise—.
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;. Labour is blossoming or dancing where. The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,. Nor beauty born out of its own despair,. Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,. Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,. How can we know the dancer from the dance? The final couplets are usually full rhymes, but this is not a fixed rule.
In particular, the sight of young children at their desks sparks a train of thought that leads to the woman who had occupied his thoughts and emotions for much of his life, namely the actress and revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he had first met when he was 23 and to whom he had proposed marriage at least five times but without success.
She married someone else in The passion of the sexes is thus a series of attempts to regain this lost unity. She was a year younger than Yeats thus 59 to his 60 and, by , was living quietly as a widow in Dublin.
Yeats had also been married for nine years by this time to Georgie Hyde-Lees , but that did not stop him wondering about what might have been had Maud accepted him. O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? There are eight of these eight-line stanzas. Is the number eight important for this poem?
Perhaps not. As a Senator, Yeats is visiting the school as a public figure, but the poem is a record of his private thoughts. Although Yeats and Gonne were never an item, she inspired him throughout his life, and he sees the two of them as kindred spirits — like the yolk and white of an egg. In the third stanza, Yeats is torn back to the present moment in the schoolroom, and wonders whether Maud was like any of the young girls in the convent school, when she was their age.
In the fourth stanza, he pictures Maud now, later in life, ageing as he himself is. He then recalls himself to the present and decides he must put a public face on while at the school, and so banishes such memories and meditations. The fifth stanza, however, sees Yeats immediately returning to such self-analysis.
The sixth stanza considers the same issue, this time from the perspective of three ancient Greek philosophers: Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. Each had his own approach to the meaning of life. The seventh stanza then shifts back to mothers, and indeed, to nuns we are in a convent school, after all. No: it is the sum of its parts. In the last analysis, it is at once direct and elliptical in its meaning — typical Yeats, we might say.
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