Her Friends bring her a Christmas Tree

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1917from The Wild Swans at Coole12 lines

Pardon great enemy,Without an angry thoughtWe’ve carried in our tree,And here and there have boughtTill all the boughs are gay,And she may look from the bedOn pretty things that mayPlease a fantastic head.Give her a little grace,What if a laughing eyeHave looked into your face⁠—It is about to die.

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

In brief

Summary

Friends bring a Christmas tree and ask Death to be gentle.

The last poem of the sequence speaks directly to Death, the "great enemy". The friends ask pardon: without any angry thought they have carried in a Christmas tree and hung it with things bought here and there, so that she can look from her bed at pretty things to please "a fantastic head". They ask Death to give her a little grace, and to forgive a laughing eye that has looked into its face, since that eye is about to die.

Lines to remember

Pardon great enemy,

It is about to die.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 8The tree
The friends address Death politely, asking "Pardon" for their small act of defiance. The tree is ordinary and cheerful, its boughs made "gay" with bought trinkets, and its purpose is simple: to please her "fantastic head" as she lies in bed.
Lines 9 to 12A plea to Death
"Give her a little grace" is a modest plea. Her "laughing eye" has looked Death in the face without fear, and the friends ask Death not to hold that against her. The final line, "It is about to die", is quiet and final.

Themes

Death personified

Death is spoken to as a person, a "great enemy" who must be asked for "Pardon" and "a little grace". The courteous tone mirrors the lady's own courtesy in the first poem: even the enemy is treated with good manners.

Small pleasures

The Christmas tree, with things bought "here and there", is another of the toys that artists offer against death. It cannot save her, but it can "Please a fantastic head", and the poem treats that small pleasure as worth defending.

Context

This is the seventh and last poem of "Upon a Dying Lady", collected in The Wild Swans at Coole (Cuala Press, 1917). The lady is usually identified as Mabel Beardsley. The sequence ends not with her death but with this plea, leaving her still alive, laughing, and looking at the tree.

Form

Twelve short three-beat lines in alternate rhyme ("enemy" and "tree", "thought" and "bought", "eye" and "die"). The simple, almost festive rhythm makes the plain final statement, "It is about to die", fall all the harder.