Unrequited Love

William Butler Yeats was twenty three years old when he met Maud Gonne. She refused repeatedly to marry him. He felt her rejection painfully.
She is the subject of his early love poems. Yeats did marry someone else late in life and had children. His early poems are bittersweet and sometimes sorrowful.
Here is one of my favorites.
Joe should have it read at my funeral.

When You Are Old

When you are old and full of sleep

And nodding by the fire, take down this book.

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep:

How many loved loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false and true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced and paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crown of stars.

His other poem I read often is "He Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven."

 Look it up, you might enjoy it.

tread softly

Olive