He remembers forgotten Beauty

Embracing his beloved, a lover touches all the lost beauty of the past.

When the speaker holds his beloved, he feels he is pressing his heart against a loveliness "long faded from the world". He lists its forms: jewelled crowns thrown into pools by fleeing kings, love stories embroidered by dreaming ladies and eaten by moths, roses woven into hair, lilies carried through sacred corridors thick with incense. Her pale breast and lingering hand seem to come from a more "dream-heavy" age. In her sighs he hears "white Beauty" sighing for all that must fade, except the flames, where silent figures sit throne over throne, brooding in half sleep over Beauty's mysteries.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 3The embrace

   When "my arms wrap you round", he presses his heart upon a loveliness that "has long faded from the world". The embrace is physical, yet at once it opens onto the past.

2. Lines 4 to 8Crowns and embroideries

   Two lost beauties: "jewelled crowns" hurled into "shadowy pools" by defeated kings, and "love-tales wrought with silken thread" by dreaming ladies. The embroideries have "made fat the murderous moth", a sharp, almost comic image of decay.

3. Lines 9 to 14Roses, lilies, incense

   Ladies once wove roses into their hair and carried "dew-cold lilies" through "many a sacred corridor". The incense rose in clouds so thick that "only the gods' eyes did not close", a picture of drowsy, holy ritual.

4. Lines 15 to 17A dream-heavy land

   Now the reason: her "pale breast and lingering hand" come from "a more dream-heavy land" and hour than the present. The repeated "dream-heavy" makes her seem a visitor from the past rather than a woman of his own time.

5. Lines 18 to 24White Beauty

   In her sighs he hears "white Beauty sighing, too" for the hours "when all must fade like dew". Only the flames last, and deep within them, "Throne over throne", figures with "swords upon their iron knees" brood in half sleep over "her high lonely mysteries".

Themes

Context

The poem was collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (Elkin Mathews, London, 1899) as "Michael Robartes remembers forgotten Beauty". Michael Robartes was a mystic from Yeats's stories of the 1890s. From 1906 the name was dropped and the speaker became simply "He".

Its lilies, embroideries, incense and sacred corridors show the richly decorated, symbolic style of Yeats's work in the 1890s, close in feeling to the Pre-Raphaelite painting he admired as a young man. Beauty here is almost a goddess, with her own "mysteries".

Form

Twenty-four lines of four-beat verse in rhyming couplets ("press" and "loveliness", "world" and "hurled"). The poem is one long sentence broken only by semicolons and colons, so the list of lost things unrolls without a full stop, like a dream that keeps going until the last line.