He wishes his Beloved were Dead

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1899from The Wind Among the Reeds13 lines

Earlier titled "Aedh wishes his Beloved were dead"

Were you but lying cold and dead,And lights were paling out of the West,You would come hither, and bend your head,And I would lay my head on your breast;And you would murmur tender words,Forgiving me, because you were dead:Nor would you rise and hasten away,Though you have the will of the wild birds,But know your hair was bound and woundAbout the stars and moon and sun:O would, beloved, that you layUnder the dock-leaves in the ground,While lights were paling one by one.

Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.

In brief

Summary

A rejected lover imagines his beloved dead, gentle and forgiving at last.

The title sounds cruel, but the poem is tender. If she were "lying cold and dead", the speaker says, she would come to him at dusk, bend her head, let him lay his head on her breast and murmur words of forgiveness. She would not hurry away as she does in life, having "the will of the wild birds"; she would know that her hair was bound about "the stars and moon and sun". The poem ends by repeating the wish, with her under the dock-leaves while the lights fade. Only death, it suggests, could make her still and kind.

Lines to remember

Were you but lying cold and dead,

Though you have the will of the wild birds,

Line by line

Lines 1 to 6If she were dead
The poem is one long "if". Were she dead, as the light fades "out of the West", she would come to him, bend her head and let him rest on her breast. She would murmur "tender words", forgiving him "because you were dead".
Lines 7 to 10No longer wild
In life she has "the will of the wild birds" and would "rise and hasten away". In death she would stay, and understand that her hair "was bound and wound" about the sun, moon and stars. The image makes her a cosmic figure whose beauty holds the heavens together.
Lines 11 to 13The wish repeated
The wish returns plainly: "O would, beloved, that you lay" in the ground "Under the dock-leaves". The poem closes as it began, with lights "paling one by one", a slow dusk that suits the hushed mood.

Themes

Love and rejection

The shocking wish is really about rejection. Alive, she is free and restless, with "the will of the wild birds", and she does not stay. Dead, she would be gentle, forgiving and near. The poem admits how far the speaker is from her by imagining the only condition in which she would come to him.

Death and dusk

Twilight frames the poem: lights are "paling out of the West" at the start and "paling one by one" at the end. Death here is not horror but stillness, pictured in soft images of evening, the grave and dock-leaves. Like several poems in The Wind Among the Reeds, it treats the end of things as a longed-for release.

Context

Published in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) as "Aedh wishes his Beloved were dead", one of several love poems given to the persona Aedh; the plain "He" replaced the name from 1906. The picture of a beloved whose hair binds the sun, moon and stars belongs to the same world of mythic love as "He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven".

Form

Thirteen lines of mostly four beats, with no stanza break. The rhymes are braided rather than paired: "dead", "head" and "dead" again, "West" and "breast", "words" and "birds", "away" and "lay", "wound" and "ground", "sun" and "one". Rhymes arrive late and far apart, so the poem drifts like a daydream circling its wish.

Title only: 1899 persona title "Aedh wishes his Beloved were dead" (Gutenberg 32233) replaced from 1906 (Gutenberg 49608). Check wording against the 1899 text before choosing a version.