I have heard the pigeons of the Seven
Woods
Make their faint thunder...
The narrator is likening one element of nature with another; the pigeons are being likened to the sound of thunder, but not the kind of thunder that one hears in the middle of a storm nearby. It is the kind of thunder that one hears when a storm is a long way away; we know that it may come and so there is an element of anticipation, and nervous energy, about the first lines of the poem in the same way that there is an element of anticipation and nervous energy before the coming of a storm. It is also an interesting way of describing the birds, not as individuals, but almost as a sound wave that is approaching.
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".
The speaker is talking about the act of writing poetry, and his feeling is that good poetry should flow and sound as if it has rolled off the tongue with ease, from the poet's mind to the paper in one fell swoop without thinking, or changing, or alteration. If it doesn't sound like that then all of the time taken to write it has been a waste of effort.
This explanation about the writing of poetry is also a metaphor for love; love is not simple, it is very complex, but it should not feel that way. If love doesn't feel easy, or natural, then it is not worth striving for because it will never work, or be the way that love is intended to be. The speaker goes on in the poem to suggest that it is the curse of the man always to give in to the temptations of women and find them irresistible.
Though now in her old age, in her
young age
She had been beautiful in that old
way
That's all but gone
This is a poem filled with paradoxes and this segment demonstrates one of these. Queen Maeve is old now, and her youthful beauty has faded, but even in her youth her beauty was that of someone much older. However, even now, it is possible to see the beauty that was once on her face. It is not just time that has stolen her beauty though, and the narrator goes on to explain that the loss of a great love has taken away the inner flame that kept her beauty alive even as it aged and became old. The narrator views beauty as something that has to be lit just as much by a fire on the inside as on the outside.
