In the Seven Woods

Yeats' focus within this book of poems seems highly concentrated in themes of age/time passing, beauty, and love. Aging takes on qualities of both praise and disdain, showing an ambivalence on the part of the poet about growing older. Lines such as "I could weep that the old is out of season," from The Arrow, show a feeling of longing for the past and yet a longing for "old" to be admired. In others Yeats sees age as a good thing. In The Folly Of being Comforted
"Time can but make her beauty again:
Because of that great nobleness in her, when she stirs,
burns more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.'"

Yet ultimately growing old indicates a loss of beauty, as is strongly expressed by the poem The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water. Perhaps more dynamically we see this idea as a result, not of time, but of dreams, in the final lines of each stanza of The Withering of the Boughs
"No boughs have withered because of the wintry wind;
The boughs have withered because I have told them my dreams."

Here a dream manages to be destructive in the beauty of nature just as the passing of time can be the destroyer of beauty in a person. This brings up the idea of the physical versus the intangible that is mentioned in the first stanza of the poem when Yeats writes "there is no place to my mind." The mind is as intangible as time or dreams and in contrast with the physical reality of nature and bodies.

Love is also featured as this intagible conflict for Yeats as in the poems Never Give all the Heart, O do not Love Too Long, and Old Memory. In all of these poems love runs into reality and Yeats seems to feel futile in the face of love, saying "when we have blamed the wind we can blame love"

Besides these strong motifs within the poems there is also a strong sense of disillusionment with mythology. This makes itself most aparent in the first line of Under The Moon
"I have no happiness in dreaming of Brycelinde,
Nor Avalon the grass-green hollow, nor joyous Isle"

This collection combines to give a feeling of despair and a lack of something to take comfort in. In the future is old age and a loss of beauty as well as of love. In the past there are myths which are easy to dismiss as ideals which can taunt reality. So we see Yeats' struggling with something to believe in which is coupled with the crisis of not being to place a physical self and reality within one that seems comprised of abstract concepts.