A woman’s face - "All Things Can Tempt Me"
A woman’s face often designates either Maud Gonne or a feminine figure that is unattainable. When Yeats writes, "All things can tempt me from this craft of verse // One time it was a woman's face", he is referring to a conflict that the speaker grapples with: the wish to stay with poetry, and the one tantalized by material beauty and the woman's looks.
Sword - "All Things Can Tempt Me"
The sword can be read in one of two ways: either as a reference to a "sharp mind", in that the poet's song was quite clever, but also as a literal sword. At the time of writing this, Yeats' poetry has gone through several stages; the celtic revival, the obsession with Maud Gonne, and the disillusionment of Irish nationalism / rebellion. The sword, which was often kept on hand by revolutionaries and nationalists, is mainly a call to the craft of poetry as a dangerous or active thing - that poetry should be as evocative, as flashy, and as revolutionary as any physical weapon.
