William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939 / County Dublin / Ireland)

This is a supurb poem that strangely is seldom anthologized or even included in collections of the poet`s selected works. The image of a king killing time (bundling time away) on his wedding day with the noise and colour of the celebrations as he waits impatiently for night to come and with it the pleasures of the marriage bed wonderfully illuminates the subject of the poem: a woman (presumably the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne whom Yeats loved to distraction) who is seen as turning her back on life in an endless round of frenetic activity, as though, like the king in the image, just putting in time until night comes, for her the eternal night of death.