September 24, 2026

What the Years Take

The years like great black oxen tread the world, / And God the herdsman goads them on behind, / And I am broken by their passing feet.

This line is spoken by Oona, the aged nurse in Yeats's early verse play The Countess Cathleen, first performed in 1899. Yeats was mourning the slow disappearance of the Ireland he had known as a boy, and grieving too for Maud Gonne's repeated refusal of his love. Oona's cry captures a grief not tied to any single death but to the accumulated weight of years passing, one after another, indifferent to any one sorrow. It speaks to anyone who has felt loss build up slowly over time rather than arrive all at once.