Lines Written In Dejection - Analysis

Mythic night as a remembered power

The poem’s central claim is stark: the speaker once lived in a world charged with grandeur and danger, and now that world has withdrawn, leaving him with a diminished, daylight endurance. Yeats begins by asking When have I last looked—a question that already assumes absence. What follows is not a normal memory but a bestiary of the imagination: dark leopards of the moon with round green eyes and long wavering bodies. These aren’t simply pretty night-creatures; they feel predatory, sleek, alive. The speaker’s dejection isn’t just sadness—it’s the specific pain of being cut off from a former intensity.

The witches: nobility mixed with grief

The first figures to disappear are All the wild witches, oddly called those most noble ladies. That phrase holds a tension: witches should be suspect, yet they’re granted rank, even dignity. Their tools and emotions are concrete—broom-sticks and tears, then Their angry tears—as if the speaker misses not only beauty but also ferocity. Even grief, in that older world, had force; it was angry, not meek. When he says they are gone, it reads like a door closing on a whole emotional register.

Centaurs and the collapse of heroic nature

The second disappearance widens the loss from witchcraft to holiness: The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished. The strange pairing of holy with centaurs matters—these are hybrid beings that reconcile opposites (animal and human, wildness and sanctity). Their vanishing suggests the speaker no longer experiences nature as a place where contradictions can be held together and made magnificent. In their place he has nothing but the embittered sun: a daytime world that is not nourishing but sour, almost resentful. The word nothing makes the exchange feel absolute, like a spiritual economy in which one currency has gone out of circulation.

Mother Moon banished, the timid sun endured

The poem turns from listing losses to naming a cause that feels personal and bodily: now that I have come to fifty years. The speaker ties the vanishing of myth to aging, as if time itself has expelled the old powers. Yeats doubles the removal—Banished heroic mother moon and vanished—so the moon is not merely absent but actively driven away. Calling her mother makes the loss intimate: it is a severing from protection, fertility, and nighttime imagination. The closing line lands with bleak resignation: I must endure the timid sun. The sun, usually a symbol of strength, is here weak, cautious, and inadequate—worse, it is something to be endured, not welcomed. The poem’s dejection is therefore not passive; it’s the humiliation of living under a light that cannot match what the speaker once knew.

A cruel trade: safety for intensity

One of the poem’s sharpest contradictions is that what has disappeared is also what might have been frightening. Leopards, witches, and centaurs are not domestic comforts. Yet the speaker mourns them because they gave life a scale large enough to be worth fear. The timid sun implies a world that may be safer, clearer, more rational—but also smaller, emotionally thinner. Dejection here isn’t simply longing for the past; it’s anger at a present that can offer only daylight moderation in exchange for the old night’s heroic risks.

The hard question the poem leaves behind

If the moon is heroic and the sun is timid, what does it mean that the speaker must live by the sun now? The poem presses the uncomfortable possibility that maturity can look like a kind of exile: not just from youth, but from the very forces—wild, holy, angry—that once made the self feel fully alive.