W B Yeats - Ephemera

'YOUR eyes that once were never weary of mine
Are bowed in sorrow under pendulous lids,
Because our love is waning.'
And then She:
'Although our love is waning, let us stand
By the lone border of the lake once more,
Together in that hour of gentleness
When the poor tired child, passion, falls asleep.
How far away the stars

seem, and how far
Is our first kiss, and ah, how old my heart!'
Pensive they paced along the faded leaves,
While slowly he whose hand held hers replied:
'Passion has often worn our wandering hearts.'
The woods were round them, and the yellow leaves
Fell like faint meteors

in the gloom, and once
A rabbit old and lame limped down the path;
Autumn was over him: and now they stood
On the lone border of the lake once more:
Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves
Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,
In bosom and hair.
'Ah, do not mourn,' he said,
'That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.'

This is an interesting poem to look at with the concept of love in mind. My own interpretation was the idea of preserving a love by letting it go, rather than holding on to it and turing it sour. Perhaps a type of young love or passion. It assumes the idea of love having a transitory nature - rather than it being eternal it is ephemeral.

Many would dispute the validity of this idea of love - surely a true love is eternal and can stand everything. Yet Yeats perhaps justifies this by avoiding the idea of a love 'dying' and that letting love go is in fact the best thing to do. The words, 'When the poor tired child, Passion, falls asleep' exemplify this idea. Firstly the idea of a child connotes an innocence; we can't help but fall in love and we are powerless to stop falling out of love. We are therefore, powerless and innocent to our emotions. However. more so Yeats carefully selects the words 'falls asleep'. The love may be 'waning' as described before but it does not die, and it is because we 'put love to bed' that it is preserved. It is through this careful imagery of love as a sleeping child that Yeats creates a purity in the love he describes.

Yeats presents this idea of 'falling out of love' as one that is entirely natural, and he achieves this (unsurprisingly!) through dense description of nature. Yeats describes 'Autumn was over him', with autumn, the season of change creating the idea of this change being a natural one. Furthermore, a change such as a seasonal one cannot be fought, 'was over him', and Yeats uses this idea to demonstrate how we cannot and should not fight the nature of our own hearts.