Lines written in Dejection

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1917from The Wild Swans at Coole11 lines

When have I last looked onThe round green eyes and the long wavering bodiesOf the dark leopards of the moon?All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,For all their broom-sticks and their tears,Their angry tears, are gone.The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;And I have nothing but harsh sun;Heroic mother moon has vanished,And now that I have come to fifty yearsI must endure the timid sun.

Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.

In brief

Summary

At fifty the poet mourns the lost moonlit visions of his youth.

The poet asks when he last saw the dark leopards of the moon, with their round green eyes and long wavering bodies. The wild witches, "those most noble ladies", are gone with their broomsticks and angry tears; the holy centaurs of the hills have vanished; so has "Heroic mother moon". In their place he has only the sun, first "harsh", then "timid". Now that he has reached fifty, he must live by that plain daylight. The poem is a short lament for a lost world of imagination.

Lines to remember

Of the dark leopards of the moon?

I must endure the timid sun.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 6The creatures of the moon
The opening question looks back to a vanished bestiary: moon-leopards, witches on broomsticks, their "angry tears". Calling the witches "those most noble ladies" shows how he honoured these wild images; they were never comic to him.
Lines 7 to 11The timid sun
The centaurs and "Heroic mother moon" have "vanished", a word used twice. All he has left is the sun, first "harsh", then, in the last line, "timid". The change of adjective is telling: the daylight world is not only hard but small and unheroic.

Themes

Loss of vision

Leopards, witches and centaurs stand for the wild, strange imagery that once came to him easily. The poem lists them only to say they are "gone" and "vanished". The dejection of the title is the dejection of a poet who fears his visionary powers have left him.

Moon and sun

The moon is "Heroic" and a "mother", ruling a world of passion and mystery; the sun is "harsh" and "timid", the light of ordinary life. The move from moon to sun is also the move from youth to middle age, made explicit in "now that I have come to fifty years".

Context

The poem was collected in The Wild Swans at Coole, published by the Cuala Press in 1917. Yeats was born in June 1865, so "fifty years" places the mood around 1915. The title recalls Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode", another poem about a poet's fear that his imagination is failing. The moon, which dominates this poem as a lost power, became central to the system of symbols Yeats developed in these same years, as in "The Phases of the Moon".

Form

A single eleven-line stanza with lines of very different lengths, from three beats to six. The rhymes are loose and scattered ("moon" hangs unanswered; "on" and "gone", "tears" and "years"), and the word "sun" ends two lines. The unsteady shape suits a poem written in low spirits.