A Deep-sworn Vow
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Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryA broken vow cannot stop one face returning at life's extremes.
The speaker tells a woman that, because she broke a solemn vow, he has turned to other friends. That is the first two lines. The rest of this six-line poem undoes them. Whenever he is at an extreme, facing death, climbing into deep sleep, or excited with wine, it is her face he suddenly meets. The poem is almost casual in tone, but it admits that no amount of new company can replace her.
Lines to remember
Suddenly I meet your face.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 2Other friends
The poem opens with a grievance stated flatly: "Others" have become his friends "because you did not keep / That deep-sworn vow". The vow is never explained, which keeps the reproach private and sharp.
Lines 3 to 6Her face returns
"Yet always" turns the poem. Three moments of heightened feeling follow, death, sleep and wine, each in its own line, and at the end of each comes the same meeting. "Suddenly I meet your face" is short and plain, like a shock.
Themes
Lasting love
The first two lines claim he has moved on; the last four show he has not. The word "always" in line 3 cancels the "Others" of line 1. Her face is not something he looks for: it arrives "Suddenly", at exactly the moments when his guard is down, which suggests it lives beneath his conscious choices.
Extremes of experience
Death, sleep and wine are three ways out of ordinary life. Looking "death in the face", clambering "to the heights of sleep" and growing "excited with wine" all take him to an edge. The echo of "face" at the end of lines 3 and 6 makes her face stand where death's face stood.
Context
The poem was collected in The Wild Swans at Coole, first published by the Cuala Press in 1917. It is usually read as addressed to Maud Gonne, the woman Yeats loved for most of his life, though the poem names no one and does not say what the vow was.
Form
Six short lines rhyming abcabc: "keep" with "sleep", "mine" with "wine", and "face" with itself. That repeated word is the point of the poem: the face he meets at the end is set against the face of death, and the rhyme cannot escape it any more than he can.
