William Butler Yeats

The Moods

The Moods - meaning Summary

Transience of Perception

Yeats’s short lyric reflects on fleeting time and shifting inner states. It compares time to a burned-out candle and suggests that natural scenes — mountains and woods — have their allotted day even as human feelings change. The poem asks who or what is lost amid these "fire-born moods," implying that identities and perceptions can fall away as moods and eras pass. Its tone is elegiac and questioning.

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Time drops in decay, Like a candle burnt out, And the mountains and woods Have their day, have their day; What one in the rout Of the fire-born moods Has fallen away?

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