He reproves the Curlew

A curlew's cry reminds a lover of the woman he has lost.

The speaker tells the curlew to stop crying overhead, or to cry only out over the western waters. Its call brings back "Passion-dimmed eyes and long heavy hair" that once lay spread across his breast. The memory is too painful: "There is enough evil in the crying of wind." In six lines the poem moves from a bird's call to a lost love and back to the sound of the weather, which alone is sad enough.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 3Cry no more

   He speaks directly to the bird, "O curlew", asking it to be silent or to take its crying "to the waters in the West", away from him. The reason follows at once: its crying "brings to my mind" something he cannot bear.

2. Lines 4 to 6What the cry recalls

   The memory comes in two details, "Passion-dimmed eyes" and "long heavy hair" once "shaken out over my breast", an image of intimacy now past. The last line closes the poem: the wind's crying is sorrow "enough" without the bird's.

Themes

Context

The poem was collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (Elkin Mathews, London, 1899) as "Hanrahan reproves the Curlew". Red Hanrahan was a wandering Gaelic poet in Yeats's own stories of the 1890s. From 1906 the name was dropped and the speaker became simply "He".

The curlew is a large wading bird of Irish shores and bogs, whose long, wailing call is often heard as a lament. Its cry and the wind's make a natural pair in a book whose title itself is about wind among reeds.

Form

Six lines rhymed abcabc ("air", "West", "mind", "hair", "breast", "wind"), with "wind" rhymed in the old way on "mind". Each rhyme waits three lines for its partner, which gives the short poem a lingering, unresolved sound until the long last line closes it.