The Falling of the Leaves

Primarily, I love this poem because of its lyrical quality (the way it sounds).  "Long leaves that love us."  Let that roll around on your tongue for a while.  "And weary and worn are our sad souls now".  The internal rhyme and organic sound structure are wonderful and amazing -- this is what lyrical poetry should sound like.  This is poetry that makes me want to memorize and recite poetry.

And of course there's more to it than just beautiful sounds.  What a sense of longing, of slowly dying in a sad but beautiful way!  The leaves are falling, the summer is dying, and so, sadly, is our passionate love.  There is nothing you can do about either -- the falling of the leaves or the passing of a passion -- but watch and feel it.  Yet to feel it is painful and beautiful. 

Rhythmically, it is anapestic (that's strong soft soft) pentameter (ten syllables, five feet) except every other line starts with a soft syllable--making the poem half feminine, which is nice since it's about a male/female relationship.  The only place it wavers rhythmically is line 5 (the hour of the waning of love has beset us) which is 13 syllables if you give "hour" two and 12 if you don't -- and I don't speak Irish enough to know if Yeats does or not.  Even with one syllable, it's one more than feminine (11) and that "the" before waning feels like the shaky syllable.   
    The second to last line (let us part, ere the season of passion forget us) is interesting because it uses a caesura (a pause, basically) that resets the rhythm after let us part -- giving us a three syllable fragment then a full anapestic pentameter line.