when all must fade like dew

Here's a W. B .Yeats poem, which I've always admired for its sheer symbolic power ...

... its taken from the pictured 1978 collection:


He Remembers Forgotten Beauty

WHEN my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jeweled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such gray clouds of incense rose
That only the gods’ eyes did not close;
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
All but the flames, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half-sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.

---

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)

---