VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

• Yeats looks for a solution to the pain of unrequited passion. In this poems original ending, Yeats conjures the nostalgia of the spring of youth and reciprocated sexuality.
• Yeats looks towards nature for inspiration, admiring the grand chestnut tree, giving forth blossoms even after old age with a continual spring of vital energy:

• However, Yeats acknowledges that mankind in old age is not looked upon with such veneration as is the old, stately tree.
• In asking his final question as to the use of a long life, he looks to the dancer – a dancer who creates his or her own choreography to the constraints of the pace of musical accompaniment.

• To Yeats, life is a series of fluid and self-invented steps, not governed by time but rather invented against time.