He gives his Beloved certain Rhymes

A poet offers his rhymes, then admits her beauty needs none.

The poem begins with a request: that the beloved fasten her hair with a golden pin and bind up every "wandering tress". The speaker has made his heart build "these poor rhymes", working day in, day out, to make "a sorrowful loveliness" out of old battles. In the second stanza he admits she needs none of it. She has only to lift a "pearl-pale hand" and bind her hair, and men's hearts will burn, while the foam and the stars "Live but to light your passing feet".

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 6Poor rhymes

   The first two lines are an intimate request about her hair. Then he describes his labour: his heart "worked at them, day out, day in", building "a sorrowful loveliness" from "the battles of old times". His poems are sad and beautiful, made from old heroic legend.

2. Lines 7 to 12Her beauty is enough

   Everything she does is effortless. She need "but lift a pearl-pale hand", bind her hair and sigh, and "all men's hearts must burn and beat". Even the "candle-like foam" on the sand and the stars in the "dew-dropping sky" exist only to light her way.

Themes

Context

The poem was collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (Elkin Mathews, London, 1899) as "Aedh gives his Beloved certain Rhymes". Aedh was one of the named voices Yeats used for the book's love poems; from 1906 the speaker became simply "He".

The lyric first appeared in 1896 inside Yeats's story "The Binding of the Hair", in which a court poet goes to battle and his severed head sings these verses to his queen. The story explains the stress on binding the hair and on "the battles of old times".

Form

Two six-line stanzas of four-beat lines, each rhymed abcabc ("pin", "tress", "rhymes", "in", "loveliness", "times"). The second stanza repeats the first stanza's pattern and its gesture of binding the hair, so the two halves mirror each other: his labour, then her ease.