Lines Written in Dejection
When have I last looked onThe round green eyes and the long wavering bodiesOf the dark leopards of the moon?All the wild witches those most noble ladies,For all their broom-sticks and their tears,Their angry tears, are gone.The holy centaurs of the hills are banished;And I have nothing but harsh sun;Heroic mother moon has vanished,And now that I have come to fifty yearsI must endure the timid sun.
Words in this poem
- angry a.
- Troublesome; vexatious; rigorous. [See Anger.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Lines Written in Dejection is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Wild Swans at Coole, Project Gutenberg ebook #32491; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: W. B. Yeats, Lines Written in Dejection, in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #32491, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/yeats-wild-swans/lines-written-in-dejection.html, id L20010.
Form and metre
Lines Written in Dejection is 11 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 A---BACDCBD onA · bodies · moon · ladies · tearsB · goneA · banishedC · sunD · vanishedC · yearsB · sunD
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| When have I last looked on | 6 | ······ |
| The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies | 11 | ·······/˘/˘ |
| Of the dark leopards of the moon? | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| All the wild witches those most noble ladies, | 11 | ···/˘··/˘/˘ |
| For all their broom-sticks and their tears, | 8 | ········ |
| Their angry tears, are gone. | 6 | ·/˘··· |
| The holy centaurs of the hills are banished; | 11 | ·/˘/·····/˘ |
| And I have nothing but harsh sun; | 8 | ···/˘··· |
| Heroic mother moon has vanished, | 10 | ˘/˘/˘··/˘˘ |
| And now that I have come to fifty years | 10 | ·······/˘· |
| I must endure the timid sun. | 8 | ··˘/·/˘· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.