The Coming of Wisdom with Time
Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.
W. B. Yeats
Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth.
Yeats’s speaker looks back on youth as a time of “lying days,” when he showed off bright leaves and flowers to the sun. Those many surfaces felt alive, but they were not the whole story. Underneath them all, he says, there is a single root—one lasting truth.
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