What I admire most about this poem is its quiet, contemplative tone. The cadences, the word choices--Yeats evokes the scene so well, of an old woman in reverie over her youthful looks and loves. The "pilgrim soul" line is immortal.
Then you examine the poem more closely and you realize that this is really a revenge poem. "Listen, Maude, you vain thing, you fall for all sorts of flatterers but you fail to recognize that only I love the real you. So let's picture you old and unbeautiful, sitting by a fire and regretting that you ever spurned me."
But Yeats is to be admired for couching all that in these beautiful images, and for a certain restraint, especially in the phrase "a little sadly." He doesn't paint a picture of this woman as experiencing miserable regret, just a little human sadness. The revenge is much less pronounced in Yeats' poem than in the original Ronsard poem, and the "conventional" idea of carpe diem (ho hum) is downplayed.
I've never been sure what to make of the lines that follow, though -- love hiding his face amid the stars. Was it good artistry to wrench this poem so far out of the human realm?
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