A change of pace to William Butler Yeats. This one stanza poem is not one of his better known pieces. It is:

The Moods

Time drops in decay,
Like a candle burnt out,
And the mountains and woods
Have their day, have their day.
What one, in the rout
Of the fire-born moods
Has fallen away?

Robert Welch in "Changing States" says, "This poem repeats the idea, already there in prose, that the passions, or the 'moods', carry with them an impetus which comes from some kind of central core of being. Yeats is not thinking here of emotions, in the normal sense of the word, but of passion or mood or something that carries out of the everyday into a connection with the large patterns that make themselves apparent in the lives, not just of individuals, but of nations or races also" (62).

I like the idea of, "a connection with the large patterns" beyond self.

Chuck