The Living Beauty

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1919from The Wild Swans at Coole10 lines

I’ll say and maybe dream I have drawn content⁠—Seeing that time has frozen up the blood,The wick of youth being burned and the oil spent⁠—From beauty that is cast out of a mouldIn bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,Appears, and when we have gone is gone again,Being more indifferent to our solitudeThan ’twere an apparition. O heart, we are old,The living beauty is for younger men,We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

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

In brief

Summary

An ageing poet turns from living beauty to the beauty of art.

The speaker says, and perhaps only dreams, that he is content with the beauty of art now that time has frozen his blood and "The wick of youth" has burned out. He will take his pleasure from beauty cast in bronze or appearing in dazzling marble, even though such beauty comes and goes as indifferently as a ghost and cares nothing for his loneliness. Then he admits the truth to his own heart: "we are old". Living beauty belongs to younger men, because he can no longer pay its tribute of "wild tears".

Lines to remember

The living beauty is for younger men,

We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 3The spent lamp
"I'll say and maybe dream" hedges the claim from the start. His blood is "frozen up", and youth is a lamp whose wick is burned and oil spent. Contentment is something he announces rather than feels.
Lines 4 to 7Bronze and marble
He turns to beauty "cast out of a mould / In bronze" or seen "in dazzling marble". Yet the repeated "Appears" and "when we have gone is gone again" show that even art's beauty is fleeting, and it is "indifferent to our solitude".
Lines 8 to 10O heart, we are old
Art's beauty is colder than "an apparition". Then the direct address, "O heart, we are old", admits what he has avoided saying. Living beauty demands "wild tears" as its tribute, and he no longer has them to give.

Themes

Age and loss

The images of age are stark: frozen blood, a burned wick, spent oil. The final lines accept that "The living beauty is for younger men". The loss is not of beauty itself but of the power to answer it with passion.

Art and life

Bronze and marble offer a beauty that asks nothing of him, but also gives nothing back: it is "more indifferent to our solitude" than a ghost. The poem weighs art's safe, cold beauty against the living kind, and the living kind clearly matters more.

Context

The poem was collected in the enlarged edition of The Wild Swans at Coole (Macmillan, 1919), a book much concerned with growing older. It is usually read in connection with Yeats's feelings for Iseult Gonne, a young woman he had proposed to and who refused him, and it pairs naturally with "Men Improve with the Years" and "To a Young Beauty".

Form

Ten five-beat lines with rhymes spread wide apart ("content" and "spent", "mould" and "old", "appears" and "tears", "again" and "men"). A long, hedged sentence fills the first eight lines; then short, plain statements close the poem, as if the speaker has stopped pretending.