Lines Written in Dejection
Lines Written in Dejection - meaning Summary
Mythic Vision Lost with Age
Yeats laments the loss of mythic imagination and youthful vision as he reaches fifty. The poem contrasts vivid, nocturnal images—dark leopards of the moon
, witches, centaurs—with an altered present where those presences have vanished. The speaker feels bereft and forced to live under an ordinary, embittered
and timid
sun, signaling diminished inspiration, disappointment, and the sober facts of middle age.
When have I last looked on The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies Of the dark leopards of the moon? All the wild witches, those most noble ladies, For all their broom-sticks and their tears, Their angry tears, are gone. The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished; I have nothing but the embittered sun; Banished heroic mother moon and vanished, And now that I have come to fifty years I must endure the timid sun.
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