Yeats’s lyric opens as an almost bewildered question: “When have I last looked on / The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies / Of the dark leopards of the moon?” The question is strange because these leopards are not natural animals. They belong to a nocturnal, lunar imagination: their eyes are round and green, and their bodies waver as if made of water or shadow. The word “last” matters. The speaker is not asking whether he ever saw them, but trying to recall when the seeing stopped. Dejection enters as a failure of memory and vision rather than as an obvious event.
The next lines turn that question into a small catalogue of disappearance. The “wild witches” are immediately redefined as “those most noble ladies,” so their wildness is not a defect but a form of uncanny power. They carry broom-sticks, yet they weep “angry tears,” a phrase repeated once as if the speaker cannot move past it. Unlike the leopards, which have simply not been looked on for a long time, the witches “are gone.” The tense hardens. So does the next declaration: “The holy centaurs of the hills are banished.” “Banished” is stronger than “gone”; it implies a deliberate expulsion, as if some new order has driven the mythic life of the hills away.
Then the poem pivots from remembered figures to the bare present. “And I have nothing but harsh sun.” The line is shorter and flatter than the wavering second line, and its monosyllables land heavily. The moon, which earlier gave the leopards their identity, is finally named directly as “Heroic mother moon,” a phrase that combines myth, battle, and maternity. The speaker’s loss is therefore not only aesthetic. He has lost a source, a parent, a heroic principle. The verbs of disappearance—gone, banished, vanished—give the lyric its shape. There is no regular rhyme scheme, but half-echoes bind the lines: tears with years, moon with sun, harsh with timid. The poem sounds as if it is circling a single wound.
The last two lines make the personal cost explicit. “And now that I have come to fifty years / I must endure the timid sun.” The word “now” marks a crossing. Fifty years is not an incidental detail; it is the moment when the speaker accepts that the moon will not return. What he must endure is odd: a “timid sun.” After the earlier “harsh sun,” the adjective shifts. The daylight is both too strong and too weak—glaring without being heroic, clear without being illuminating. The sun lacks the moon’s green-eyed mystery, the witches’ nobility, the centaurs’ holiness. To live under it is not tragic agony but the smaller, longer ache of a disenchanted world.
The poem’s significance lies in that compression. In eleven lines it moves from a question about lost vision to a declaration about what remains. The leopards, witches, centaurs, and moon are not merely decorative; they stand for an older, wilder, more meaningful way of seeing. When they vanish, the speaker is left with only the ordinary sun. Yeats makes dejection feel like exile—not from a place, but from a whole dimension of experience.