• The first four stations or stanzas of the poem begin with Roman numerals, informing the reader that the poem will appear in stages, seemingly starting anew after each stanza.
• The poem, following octava rima form, has eight stanzas, with each stanza consisting of eight lines of verse. Each stanza contains a unit of six lines followed by a unit of two lines, giving the poem an ABABABCC form.

I
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way - the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire. A tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age -
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler’s heritage -
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

• He envisions his beloved as a type of Mary Magdalene. Yeats evokes a figure similar to Donatello’s 15th century emaciated, ravaged Magdalene.

IV
Her present image floats into the mind -
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

• Yeats returns from his dream to the classroom, smiling upon the students and choosing for himself the role of the smiling old scarecrow.
• Yeats completes the diptych: once possessing pretty plumage, he is now a sixty-year-old scarecrow; she, once a living child, now is a time-ravaged woman.