In a few quick images, Joseph Campbell turns the same landscape into two completely different emotional worlds. The first stanza belongs to summer and youth. The hills of Cualann appear soft, fertile, and radiant: golden horns, a nursing mother’s breasts, tents of light. There is warmth and promise here, a sense of life just beginning.
Then the poem shifts to winter and old age. The same hills become rusted swords, waves of darkness, moons of ice. Everything that was warm and generous now feels hard, cold, and faintly threatening. The speaker doesn’t need to say that youth fades; the paired images do that work. The mood moves from lush brightness to stark, quiet cold, leaving a sense of beauty in both seasons but also of inevitable change. It is a miniature meditation on how time alters the world and the way we see it.