As a young man, William Butler Yeats was deeply affected by the idea of romantic love, or, as he called it, 'the old high way of love.' Characteristically, much of his early poetry, that which was written prior to 1910, is poetry that belongs to courtship.
When Yeats was twenty-three years old, he met and fell in love with the beautiful Irish nationalist, Maud Gonne. Although she repeatedly refused to marry Yeats, Maud would become the object of his passion and his poetry. The emotional power of many in Yeats's early poems is shaped by the one-sidedness of his affair with Maud, but the poems themselves remain hopeful and bittersweet, pure in their language and attitudes about love.
The forty-one poems collected in A Poet to His Beloved represent some of Yeats's most evocative and passionate early love poems. These verses are simple, lyrical and often dreamy, and they speak knowingly of innocence and beauty, passion and desire, devotion and the fear of rejection.
When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
and slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes once had, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountain overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Jacket art: The Cyder Fest by Edward Calvert
