First Love
First Love
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryA young man loves a moon-like beauty and finds her heart is stone.
The opening poem of "A Man Young and Old". A young man remembers the woman he first loved. She belonged to "beauty's murderous brood", cold and distant as the moon, yet for a while she blushed and stood in his path, and he believed she had "A heart of flesh and blood". When he touched it he found "a heart of stone", and since then nothing he tries comes to anything. Her smile transfigured him, and left him a maundering "lout", his mind as empty as the night sky when the moon sails out.
Lines to remember
In beauty's murderous brood,
And found a heart of stone
For every hand is lunatic
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6A heart of flesh
She was "nurtured like the sailing moon", one of "beauty's murderous brood": lovely, remote and dangerous. Yet she "walked awhile and blushed awhile" and stood on his path, and the gentle repetition lets him believe, for a moment, that her body held "A heart of flesh and blood".
Lines 7 to 12A heart of stone
When he "laid a hand thereon" he found "a heart of stone". Since then he has "attempted many things / And not a thing is done". The last two lines explain why: "every hand is lunatic / That travels on the moon", and "lunatic" itself means moon-struck.
Lines 13 to 18The empty sky
Her smile "transfigured" him, but into "a lout", wandering and "Maundering here, and maundering there". The final image is exact and sad: his mind is as empty of thought as the circling heavens are of stars "When the moon sails out" and drowns them with her light.
Themes
Beauty and cruelty
Her beauty is "murderous" and her heart is "stone". The poem does not blame her for being cruel on purpose: she belongs to a "brood", a kind, as the moon belongs to the sky. Beauty draws him close and then leaves him with nothing, and the flat line "And not a thing is done" measures the damage.
The moon
The moon runs through all three stanzas: she is "nurtured like the sailing moon", his hand "travels on the moon", and at the end the moon "sails out" and blots out the stars. The moon stands for a beauty that is bright, cold and out of reach, and for the madness ("lunatic") of trying to hold it.
Context
"First Love" opens "A Man Young and Old", a sequence of eleven poems first collected in The Tower (Macmillan, 1928). The sequence follows one man from young love to bitter old age, and ends with a chorus from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. Yeats later wrote a companion sequence, "A Woman Young and Old".
The moon-like woman is usually read as drawing on Yeats's long, unreturned love for Maud Gonne, though the poem keeps her nameless. The moon, a central symbol in Yeats's thought of the 1920s, links this poem to "Human Dignity" and "The Empty Cup" that follow.
Form
Three six-line stanzas in ballad metre, lines of four beats alternating with lines of three. Only the short lines rhyme ("brood", "stood", "blood"; "stone", "done", "moon"), some of them slant. The simple, song-like shape gives a plain, rueful voice to a young man's disappointment.