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A continuing selection of classic and contemporary poems.

The Living Beauty

William Butler Yeats

I bade, because the wick and oil are spent
And frozen are the channels of the blood,
My discontented heart to draw content
From beauty that is cast out of a mould
In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,
Appears, but when wc have gone is gone again,
Being more indifferent to our solitude
Than ’twere an apparition.  O heart, we are old;
The living beauty is for younger men:
We cannot pay its rribute of wild tears.
Online text © 1998-2008 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From The Wild Swans at Coole | 1919
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