Father and Child

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1929from The Winding Stair and Other Poems8 lines

She hears me strike the board and sayThat she is under banOf all good men and women,Being mentioned with a manThat has the worst of all bad names;And thereupon repliesThat his hair is beautiful,Cold as the March wind his eyes.

Text: The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, London, 1933). Public domain.

In brief

Summary

A father condemns his daughter's lover; she answers by praising his hair.

The father speaks. He strikes the table and tells his daughter that all good people shun her, because her name is linked with a man who has "the worst of all bad names". Her reply ignores the charge entirely: the man's hair is beautiful, and his eyes are "Cold as the March wind". The whole poem is one sentence, and the daughter gets the last word.

Lines to remember

Cold as the March wind his eyes.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 5The father's anger
He strikes the board and warns her that she is "under ban" of "all good men and women" because she is mentioned with a man of "the worst of all bad names". The heavy, public language is the language of respectability.
Lines 6 to 8Her answer
She answers with no argument at all. His hair is beautiful, his eyes "Cold as the March wind". The cold eyes might be a warning, yet she offers them as praise: the father's world of reputation and the daughter's world of desire never meet.

Themes

Youth and age

The poem sets two generations against each other in eight lines. The father speaks for reputation and the judgement of "all good men and women"; the daughter speaks only of the man's beauty. Neither persuades the other, and the gap between them is the point.

Desire

The daughter's reply is dangerous in its innocence. She loves the man for his looks, even the chill in his eyes. The poem does not judge her, and the strange beauty of the last line makes her choice easy to understand.

Context

The poem opens "A Woman Young and Old", a sequence of eleven poems first published in The Winding Stair (New York, 1929) and collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933). The sequence follows a woman from girlhood to old age and is the counterpart of "A Man Young and Old" in The Tower. Here she is still a girl, seen through her father's eyes.

Form

Eight short lines forming a single sentence, with longer and shorter lines alternating like a ballad. Only lines 2 and 4 ("ban" and "man") and 6 and 8 ("replies" and "eyes") rhyme, so the final rhyme falls on her last word about him.