A Drinking Song
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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 short toast on wine, love and the little we can know.
Six lines, a single breath. The first four state a small philosophy: wine enters by the mouth and love by the eye, and that is all the truth we will learn before we age and die. The last two lines turn the thought into action. The speaker raises his glass, looks at someone across the table, and sighs. The sigh carries the poem: the wine is easy to have, the love perhaps is not.
Lines to remember
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4The whole of wisdom
Two balanced statements set wine and love side by side, each with its own doorway into us. Then comes a shrug of wisdom: "That's all we shall know for truth" before we "grow old and die". The tone is light, but the thought is bleak.
Lines 5 to 6Glass and glance
The toast becomes a scene. He lifts his glass to his mouth and looks at someone with his eye, acting out both halves of the opening. The final "I sigh" hints that only the first pleasure is his to take.
Themes
Love and desire
The poem pairs love with wine as a simple sense experience: it "comes in at the eye". Yet the ending separates them. The wine reaches his mouth; the person he looks at stays across the table, and all he can do is sigh. The poem's lightness covers an unanswered longing.
Mortality
"Before we grow old and die" sets these brief pleasures against a short life. The claim that this is "all we shall know for truth" sets aside grand philosophy: whatever we learn, we learn through the senses, and not for long. That is the old wisdom of the drinking song, where a toast is also a reminder of death.
Context
"A Drinking Song" was first collected in The Green Helmet and Other Poems, printed by the Cuala Press in December 1910 in an edition of 400 copies. The collection shows Yeats turning away from the dreamy music of his early verse towards plainer, sharper statement, and this tiny song shows that economy at its most extreme.
Form
Six short lines of three beats, rhymed ABABAB. The B rhymes ("eye", "die", "sigh") are full and clear, while "mouth" and "truth" only half chime. The return of "mouth" in line 5 ties the toast back to its opening words, and the whole poem is short enough to be sung or spoken over a raised glass.