The Living Beauty
The Living Beauty - context Summary
Composed in Late Life
Placed among Yeats's Last Poems, this short piece confronts aging and the poet's diminished access to living beauty. The speaker, sensing bodily and emotional decline, turns to statues and marble only to find them indifferent and unsatisfying. He recognizes that passionate, living beauty belongs to younger men and admits he can no longer pay its emotional cost, summed in tribute of wild tears
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I bade, because the wick and oil are spent And frozen are the channels of the blood, My discontented heart to draw content From beauty that is cast out of a mould In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears, Appears, but when wc 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 rribute of wild tears.
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