Yes, poem #3 was missed, and a very popular poem it is too. But lets talk about this one first, I guess, since it's already quite underway, and there is no need to digress now.
This poem seems to me at first a play on Marlowe's Shepard to his Live, and other such pastoral style poems written in English, and the Greek tradition. He is lamenting, it would seem, his inability to go on consummating his relationship with the "nymph", in this case referring to young women, because he has grown old by the stream, and therefore cannot partake any more.
The poem is loaded with allusions to old age, regret, and rings similar to Frost's Road not Taken, in the sense that it ponders, and laments, the linear flow of time, and talks about the regrets of aging, of knowing you had wasted time in your youth, and not being able to change anything.
The poem itself seems rather simple, and flawed by language in many areas (the language has not reached the perfection Yeats achieved in other poems, and relies on simplistic imagery and repetitive words and lines), but still has something, that great line of irony:
"Delighted to be but wise,
For men improve with the years;
And yet and yet
Is this my dream, or the truth? "
Yeats is asking if such knowledge and experience is said to increase man, are we but lying to ourselves. He is unable to do what he likes best, that is, attract and have a relationship with a nymph, and he realizes that everything else, the experience, the knowledge of the world, the successes and failures in his life, mean nothing, because though he understands, he cannot experience, and therefore is living through what cannot or had not been done, instead of what he wishes could be done.
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Originally Posted by JBI
