Peace

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1910from The Green Helmet and Other Poems11 lines

Ah, that Time could touch a formThat could show what Homer’s ageBred to be a hero’s wage.“Were not all her life but storm,Would not painters paint a formOf such noble lines,” I said,“Such a delicate high head,All that sternness amid charm,All that sweetness amid strength?”Ah, but peace that comes at length,Came when Time had touched her form.

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

In brief

Summary

Time brings peace to a stormy, heroic beauty, at a cost.

The poet looks at a woman whose beauty seemed made for Homer's heroic age, the kind of beauty that was once "a hero's wage". He remembers saying that if her life had not been all storm, painters would have painted her "noble lines", her "delicate high head", her mixture of sternness and charm, sweetness and strength. The last two lines bring a quiet, double-edged change: peace has come to her at last, but only because "Time had touched her form". Calm arrives with age.

Lines to remember

All that sternness amid charm,

All that sweetness amid strength?

Came when Time had touched her form.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 3A heroic beauty
"Ah, that Time could touch a form" opens with a sigh. Her body is one that "Homer's age" would have bred as "a hero's wage", a prize worth fighting for, the kind of beauty that belongs in epic.
Lines 4 to 9What painters missed
He recalls his own words: "Were not all her life but storm", painters would surely paint her "noble lines" and "delicate high head". The balanced phrases, "sternness amid charm" and "sweetness amid strength", catch a beauty made of opposites.
Lines 10 to 11Peace at length
"Ah, but peace" answers the opening sigh. The peace that "comes at length" has come to her, but only when "Time had touched her form". The last line repeats the first, now as a fact rather than a wish, and gentleness and loss arrive together.

Themes

Beauty and time

The poem begins and ends with Time touching her "form". In the first line this is a wistful thought; in the last it has happened. Age has brought calm to a stormy life, but it has also softened the heroic beauty the middle of the poem so carefully describes.

Storm and peace

Her life was nothing "but storm", too restless to sit for a painter. The poem admires that restlessness while regretting it. The peace she finds at last is welcome, yet it comes with ageing, so the title carries a faint sadness as well as relief.

Context

The poem was published in The Green Helmet and Other Poems (Cuala Press, 1910), with minor verbal revisions in later texts. It is usually read as a poem about Maud Gonne, and its picture of a Homeric beauty links it to "A Woman Homer Sung" and "No Second Troy" in the same book, where Yeats compares her to Helen of Troy.

Form

A single stanza of eleven short lines in a quick, seven-syllable trochaic beat ("Ah, that Time could touch a form"). The word "form" ends lines 1, 5 and 11, and it chimes with "storm" and "charm", while "age" and "wage", "said" and "head", "strength" and "length" rhyme in pairs. The repeated "form" frames the poem.

Minor verbal revisions between 1912 and later texts.