The Yeats is lovely, Bill.
Below, a forty-seven-year-old narrator grieves that the woman he loves isn't able to fall in love with a man with "My hundred of gray hairs...My mountain belly and my rocky face," despite his having poured out his heart and soul to her in poetry.
It's poignant, but I suspect that the real problem here is the man's own apparent inability to fall in love with an available woman his own age, with a similarly time-worn body, who would presumably be more receptive to his poetic charms.
My Picture Left in Scotland
by Ben Jonson
I now think Love is rather deaf than blind,
For else it could not be
That she,
Whom I adore so much, should so slight me
And cast my love behind.
I'm sure my language to her was as sweet,
And every close did meet
In sentence of as subtle feet,
As hath the youngest He
That sits in shadow of Apollo's tree.
O, but my conscious fears,
That fly my thoughts between,
Tell me that she hath seen
My hundred of gray hairs,
Told seven and forty years
Read so much waste, as she cannot embrace
My mountain belly and my rocky face;
And all these through her eyes have stopp'd her ears.
A few poets celebrate the joys of longstanding, stable relationships--I recently ran across a charming one in Spanish that I should probably try to translate at some point--but the mood swings of the initial infatuation definitely make more dramatic material for a poet to work with. Which is probably why Ronsard kept moving on to new mistresses so often--Pregnancy has now changed those perfect, perky little tits I used to write sonnets about, so it's time again to turn my attention to another teenaged muse!
Longstanding, stable relationships mainly get poeticized, if they are at all, only in retrospect, when the spouse is no longer around to appreciate the resulting poem. This may be due in part to the widespread misconception that the whole point of getting married is to be able to take one's partner for granted, and dispense with the bother of having to woo her (or him) anymore.
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