The Living Beauty

Portrait of William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats 1865–1939

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.

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