I can’t for the life of me remember which Yeats poem Marion and Kristoph are referring to in this story. I know I had read it and a critique of it the week before but I have since forgotten. I might find it one of these days. One problem is that the theme of beautiful women getting old and losing their looks is a common theme of a lot of his poetry. Yeats was extremely negative about love and assumed that it faded when the object of his love lost her beauty. As history shows, the particular object of his obsession spurned him long before she had chance to ‘fade’ and I am hardly surprised if that was his attitude. He obviously never imagined that love was anything more than physical attraction. I’m tempted to wonder how he would do as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent. But let’s not go there.

Kristoph, for whom age is a much more complicated matter than it was for W.B. Yeats, is far more philosophical. He is, as he reveals here, Two thousand, eight hundred and fifty four years old, and he expects that, before he reaches three thousand, he will have loved a Human woman whose youthful beauty will have faded. Unlike Yeats, he’s ready to do that. And that, basically, is the point of this story.

By the way, if anyone CAN work out which poem they’re talking about, let me know. It’s starting to bug me, now.

http://www.csun.edu/~hceng029/yeats/collectedpoems.html