SOURCE: "'Heart Mysteries': The Later Love Lyrics of W. B. Yeats," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp.

In the following excerpt, Perloff provides explications of structure, semantics, and sound and uses biographical information about Yeats's feelings for Maud Gonne during the last two decades of his life to analyze lyrics of Yeats's second Maud Gonne cycle.

In the love lyrics of his last decade, Yeats, the critics would have it, finally turned from a disembodied and sterile courtly ideal to "desecration and the lover's night." The last stanza of "Among School Children," for example, with its famous assertion that "Labour is blossoming or dancing where/ The body is not bruised to pleasure soul," can be viewed, as it is by Donald Davie, as the rejection of the Romantic tradition of sexual passion which comes from the courtly love of the Middle Ages through the Vita Nuova to the...