I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
In these lines, the speaker lays out the ironic principle at the heart of the poem: that the most natural and effortless-seeming objects of beauty are in fact produced only with enormous amounts of effort and work. A line of poetry may take hours to perfect, the speaker argues here, but the intention of those hours of work is to create a product that seems spontaneous and immediate. Yeats uses the metaphor of sewing here, linking poetry to a form of labor that is more obviously time-consuming and difficult, and therefore exposing poetry as equally time-consuming and difficult. Meanwhile, these lines are themselves effortfully nonchalant, containing simple grammar and conversational diction and yet subtly sticking to a strict meter and rhyme scheme. They therefore illustrate the speaker's point by showing the invisibility of complex, painstaking literary labor.
"To be born woman is to know—
Although they do not talk of it at school—
That we must labour to be beautiful."
Here, the "beautiful mild woman" contributes another instance of "Adam's curse," observing that womanhood often involves carefully and laboriously constructing a beautiful facade. A notable element of this observation is the woman's mention of schooling. The skill and work involved in creating feminine beauty must be learned outside of formal education, and in fact are not even mentioned in school settings. Here Yeats, through the persona of the woman, comments not only on the effort behind aesthetic beauty, but also on the undue expectations placed upon women, and the thanklessness with which these expectations are met.
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
Here, the poem moves away from its dialogue-heavy earlier section, and a more introspective, meditative segment begins. The speaker's tiredness is legible in his characterization of nature, which is also described here as tired and worn by time. Alliterative W sounds in the words "worn," "washed," and "waters," as well as L sounds closing the words "shell" and "fell," create a lulling feeling of fluidity and quiet. Meanwhile, long, mournful vowel sounds in "moon," "worn," and "rose" contribute further to these lines' mood of melancholy weariness.
