The Moods

Time drops in decay, Like a candle burnt out, And the mountains and the woods Have their day, have their day; What one in the rout Of the fire-born moods Has fallen away? About this poem: Literary scholar Richard Ellman writes in The Identity of Yeats that "Moods...are conspicuously, but not exclusively, emotional or temperamental; they differ from emotions in having form and, often, intellectual structure. Less fleeting than a mere wish, and less crystallized than a belief, a mood is suspended between fluidity and solidity. It can be tested only by the likelihood of its being experienced at all, and being so, by many people."