About the Poet: W.B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature.

  • His early poetry is part of the Celtic Twilight or Irish Literary Revival, using the history, myths and heroic figures of Ireland.
  • He wrote plays and was one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
  • He witnessed the revolutionary politics of Ireland.
  • He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
  • Later, under the influence of Ezra Pound, he wrote modernist poetry.
  • He is counted among the great love poets of the world.

Background (not in the textbook). The poem was published in 1893 in Yeats's collection The Rose. It is usually read as addressed to Maud Gonne, the Irish actress and revolutionary whom Yeats loved for many years but who refused to marry him. It is loosely based on a sonnet by the French poet Pierre de Ronsard.

[Exam Tip] — Yeats is Irish, not English. The Nobel year 1923 is a common one-mark question.

Summary

The speaker is a lover who speaks to the woman he loves now, while she is young. He asks her to imagine a time in the future when she is old.

Stanza 1 - the old woman by the fire. When she is old, grey and sleepy, nodding by the fire, she should take down this book - the book of poems he is writing now - and read it slowly. It will make her dream of the soft look her eyes once had, and of their deep shadows.

Stanza 2 - the one true lover. She will remember how many people loved her moments of glad grace and her beauty, some sincerely and some falsely. But one man loved her pilgrim soul - her restless, searching spirit - and loved the sorrows of her changing face as she grew older.

Stanza 3 - love that fled. Bending down beside the glowing bars of the fireplace, she will murmur a little sadly how Love fled, paced upon the mountains overhead, and hid his face amid a crowd of stars - true love left her life and became distant and unreachable.

Central Idea

  • Physical beauty is short-lived; true love is lasting. Many loved her beauty, but only the speaker loved her soul and even the sorrows that would change her face.
  • The poem is also a quiet regret and a gentle warning: if she rejects this true love now, she will realise its value only in old age, when it has gone.
  • The speaker hopes his poems will keep his love alive and make her remember him.

Love is personified in the last lines - "Love fled / And paced upon the mountains overhead / And hid his face amid a crowd of stars".

[Exam Tip] — 2025 asked (2 marks) for the two reasons the poet loved his beloved: he loved her pilgrim soul and the sorrows of her changing face. It also asked (MCQ) where Love hid his face: amid a crowd of stars.