Her Dream

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1932from The Winding Stair and Other Poems

About the text

Yeats first published this poem in 1932. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2028, and this site is served partly from American servers. So for now we give the notes without the full text; it will appear here in 2028.

It begins: I dreamed as in my bed I lay

In brief

Summary

A woman dreams her sacrificed hair becomes a constellation in the sky.

A woman dreams, with all the deep wisdom of night upon her, that she has cut off her hair and laid it on the inscribed tomb of Love. Something sweeps it away in a great storm of air, and afterwards nails it to the night sky as Berenice's burning hair, the constellation. Her private sacrifice to a dead love is lifted into the stars.

Lines to remember

Berenice's burning hair.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 4Hair on Love's tomb
In bed, visited by the night's "fathomless wisdom", she dreams she has shorn her hair and laid it on Love's lettered tomb, an offering of mourning for a love that is over.
Lines 5 to 8Nailed to the night
A great tumult of air carries the hair out of sight, then nails it to the night sky as the burning hair of Berenice. The violent verb "nailed" makes the transformation both glorious and painful.

Themes

Sacrifice

Cutting and offering her hair is an act of mourning and devotion. The myth of Berenice, whose hair was offered to the gods and became stars, gives her private grief a heavenly reward. Loss is turned into something permanent and shining.

Dream wisdom

The dream comes with "All night's fathomless wisdom". What she cannot understand awake is revealed in sleep: that love, though entombed, can be transfigured. The poem trusts vision over reason.

Context

The poem belongs to the sequence Words for Music Perhaps, first collected by the Cuala Press in 1932 and then in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). It follows "Love's Loneliness" and is answered by "His Bargain", which also turns on a woman's hair.

Berenice was a queen of ancient Egypt who, in the classical story, dedicated a lock of her hair for her husband's safe return from war; when it vanished from the temple, it was said to have been placed among the stars as the constellation Coma Berenices.

Form

One eight-line stanza of four-beat lines rhyming ABABCDCD. It is a single sentence that turns at "But" in line 5, so the first half lays down the offering and the second half snatches it up into the sky, ending on the proper name.