A Bronze Head
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1939. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2035, and this site is served partly from American servers. So for now we give the notes without the full text; it will appear here in 2035.
It begins: Here at right of the entrance this bronze head
In brief
SummaryA bronze bust of the aged Maud Gonne makes Yeats ask who she was.
Standing before a bronze head by a gallery entrance, Yeats sees Maud Gonne in old age: human and superhuman at once, withered like a mummy, with a bird's round eye. He wonders what terror it shows. Then he remembers her young, full of light and yet gentle, and asks which of her forms showed her true self, or whether a self can be many things at once. Even in her youth he saw a wildness in her, as if some vision of terror had shattered her soul, or as if a sterner, supernatural eye looked through hers at a world in decline and wondered what was left for massacre to save.
Lines to remember
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 7The bronze head
Yeats looks at a head by the entrance: human and superhuman, with a bird's round eye, the rest withered and dead as a mummy. He asks what great haunter of tombs sweeps the sky and finds nothing to lessen its terror except the hysterical passion of its own emptiness.
Lines 8 to 14Which form was true?
She was no haunter of tombs once. He recalls her young form, filled as if with generous light, yet a most gentle woman. Which of her forms showed her true substance? Perhaps, as the philosopher McTaggart thought, a self can be composite, holding the extremes of life and death in a single breath.
Lines 15 to 21Wildness from the start
Even at the starting-post of her life, sleek and new like a young racehorse, he saw wildness in her and feared a vision of terror had shattered her soul. He admits that nearness to her drove his own imagination wild, until he wandered about murmuring anxious endearments over her like a parent.
Lines 22 to 28A sterner eye
Or else he thought her supernatural, as if a sterner eye looked through hers at a foul world in decline: upstart families grown great, great families run dry, ancestral pearls thrown to the pigs, heroic dreams mocked by clowns and knaves. The poem ends by wondering what could be left for massacre to save.
Themes
Maud Gonne
The poem is Yeats's last long look at the woman he loved for half a century. He sees her in three ways: the withered old face in bronze, the radiant young woman full of light, and a wild, possessed figure. He does not choose between them. Love and fear are mixed from the start, when he murmured over her as over a child.
The many selves
The central question is "Which of her forms" showed her real substance. Yeats draws on the philosopher McTaggart to suggest that a self can be composite, containing opposites at once, even life and death "in a breath". The bronze head, both human and superhuman, embodies that doubleness. Identity in this poem is layered, not single.
Decline and violence
The last stanza widens into a bitter view of the modern world: noble families dying out, upstarts rising, treasures thrown into a sty, heroism mocked. The supernatural eye that looks through hers judges this decline, and the final line wonders grimly whether anything is left worth saving by massacre. It is one of Yeats's darkest late statements.
Context
The poem was first published in Last Poems and Two Plays (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1939), after Yeats's death. The head is a bust of Maud Gonne in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, now the Hugh Lane Gallery. Yeats had met her in 1889 and loved her for most of his life; by the late 1930s both were in their seventies.
It is one of several late poems in which Yeats looks back on the people who shaped him, alongside "The Municipal Gallery Revisited", written about the same gallery, and "Beautiful Lofty Things". Its closing stanza shares the fear of modern decline and degeneration that runs through much of his last writing.
Form
Four seven-line stanzas in rhyme royal, the old form of long lines rhyming ABABBCC. The long, often irregular pentameters let the thought twist and qualify itself, and each closing couplet brings a stanza to a heavy stop, most of all in the long final line about massacre.
