The Speaker
The speaker is an unidentified person recalling a conversation with two others—one beloved listener, and a beautiful woman who is a friend of that listener. The speaker is also a poet, and in fact, his contribution to the conversation with these two companions concerns the writing of poetry. Moreover, he is thoughtful, ruminative, and somewhat bitter, reflecting ruefully that any amount of beauty in life involves an exhausting amount of conscious effort, and musing about the dissatisfaction and disillusionment of his relationship with the addressee. While the poem is not explicitly autobiographical, it does draw upon real events from Yeats's life, especially his on-and-off relationship with Maud Gonne: in fact, it was written only shortly before Gonne's 1903 marriage to another man.
The Addressee
Just as the speaker is partly constructed out of the real W.B. Yeats, the beloved addressed in the work is at least partially based on the actress, activist, and writer Maud Gonne, with whom Yeats had a convoluted and difficult years-long relationship. In the context of the poem, this addressee is silent. Rather than speaking up, she appears to listen to the conversation around her, and fades into the background of the work. Only when the speaker directly addresses her—noting her beauty, his love for her, and his feelings of exhaustion in the context of that love—does she come to the fore of the poem.
The Woman
The poem's third character is described as a friend of the speaker's beloved, and is spoken of in admiring terms. The speaker describes her as both physically beautiful and socially warm, and notes that her voice is so lovely as to induce heartbreak in men. While the speaker takes note of the labor that goes into poetry and love, this woman instead raises the topic of physical beauty, noting that women's beauty is a product of effort rather than nature. In this way, we see that the "curse" of the title can apply differently depending on the concerns and pressures placed on individuals—for a poet the curse emerges in art, for the lover the curse emerges in heartache, and for women, the curse emerges in the mandate to be attractive.
