He tells of the Perfect Beauty

A woman's gaze outdoes all the poets' efforts to create beauty.

The poem begins by addressing the beloved's "cloud-pale eyelids" and "dream-dimmed eyes". Poets labour all their lives to build "a perfect beauty in rhyme", but they are overthrown by a single woman's gaze and by the stars, "the unlabouring brood of the skies". So the speaker's heart will bow, each night as the dew falls, until the end of time, before two things that need no labour to be beautiful: the stars and her.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 5The poets overthrown

   After the opening address, the argument begins. The poets "labouring all their days" to build beauty in verse "Are overthrown by a woman's gaze" and by the stars, "the unlabouring brood of the skies". The contrast of "labouring" and "unlabouring" carries the point.

2. Lines 6 to 8The bowing heart

   "And therefore" draws the conclusion. His heart will bow each night as the dew falls, "dropping sleep", and will go on doing so "until God burn time". The last line sets the stars and "you" side by side as equals.

Themes

Context

The poem was collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (Elkin Mathews, London, 1899) as "Aedh tells of the perfect Beauty"; from 1906 the speaker became simply "He". It follows "He tells of a Valley full of Lovers" in the book, and its first line picks up that poem's image of the lost love's eyelids and eyes.

Yeats returned to the labour of making verse, set beside a woman's beauty, in "Adam's Curse", collected a few years later in In the Seven Woods (1903). There the tone is weary and conversational, but the question is the same one this short lyric answers with worship: what the poet's long labour is worth beside beauty that costs nothing.

Form

Eight four-beat lines rhymed abcbadcd ("eyes", "days", "rhyme", "gaze", "skies", "dew", "time", "you"). The rhymes are spread out so each waits for its partner, and the last pairing, "dew" answered by "you", ties the beloved to the falling dew and the night sky.