He bids his Beloved be at Peace

A lover asks his beloved to hide a vision of coming disaster.

The speaker hears "the Shadowy Horses" galloping, wild and white-eyed, while each quarter of the sky brings its own mood: night from the North, hidden joy from the East, weeping dew from the West, roses of crimson fire from the South. All human sleep, hope and desire seem empty as "The Horses of Disaster" plunge through the clay. He turns to the woman beside him and asks her to half close her eyes and let her hair fall over his breast, so that love's rest can drown the sound and hide the horses from sight.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 2The Shadowy Horses

   He hears the horses before he sees them: manes shaking, hoofs "heavy with tumult", eyes "glimmering white". Heavy stresses and long lines give the sound of galloping.

2. Lines 3 to 6The four quarters

   Each direction brings something: the North "clinging, creeping night", the East "her hidden joy before the morning break", the West pale dew and sighs, the South "roses of crimson fire". The whole sky is in motion, a round of night, dawn, dusk and noon.

3. Lines 7 to 8Disaster

   He cries out at the "vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire": all are useless against what is coming. "The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay", their true name now given, bogged in earth yet unstoppable.

4. Lines 9 to 12Rest in love

   The poem turns to "Beloved". He asks her to half close her eyes and let her heart beat over his and her hair fall across his breast, "Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest" and hiding the horses' "tumultuous feet". Love cannot stop disaster, only veil it.

Themes

Context

The poem was collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (Elkin Mathews, London, 1899) as "Michael Robartes bids his Beloved be at Peace". Michael Robartes was a mystic from Yeats's stories of the 1890s, and he returns in later poems. From 1906 the name was dropped and the speaker became simply "He".

The four quarters of the sky, each with its own quality, reflect Yeats's study of magic and symbol in the 1890s, when he belonged to the occult Order of the Golden Dawn. The sense of approaching catastrophe runs through several poems in the book, including "The Valley of the Black Pig".

Form

Twelve long lines, mostly of six beats, in one stanza made of three enclosing rhyme groups: abba cddc effe ("a-shake", "white", "night", "break"). The "tumult" of line 2 returns as "tumultuous" in the last line, so the poem ends by covering the very noise it began with.