His Bargain
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: Who talks of Plato's spindle
In brief
SummaryA lover's bargain with a woman's hair, made before time began.
The speaker brushes aside talk of Plato's spindle, the cosmic wheel that sets time turning. Eternity may shrink and time unwind, and ordinary men like Dan and Jerry Lout may swap their loves about, but he is different. Before the thread of time began, he made a bargain with a woman's hair and all its windings, and he may not break it even when the last thread has run out.
Lines to remember
Who talks of Plato's spindle;
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6Plato's spindle
Who cares, he asks, about Plato's spindle and what set it whirling. Eternity may dwindle and time unwind. Meanwhile common lovers, Dan and Jerry Lout, change partners as they please.
Lines 7 to 12The bargain
However others take it, he made a bargain before the thread of time began, and may not break it when the last thread runs out. It was made with "that hair" and all its windings, so the woman's hair outlasts the spindle of the universe.
Themes
Love beyond time
The poem sets one lover's commitment against the whole of cosmic time. The spindle turns and time unwinds, but his bargain was made before the first thread and holds after the last. Love is imagined as older and stronger than time itself.
Threads and windings
The poem is woven from images of thread: the spindle, time "unwound", the thread beginning and running out, and the windings of the woman's hair. Her curls become a thread that binds him more firmly than fate.
Constancy
Dan and Jerry Lout stand for fickle ordinary lovers. The speaker defines himself against them. His constancy is not a choice renewed each day but a bargain he "may not break".
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 answers "Her Dream", in which a woman's hair is carried into the stars.
Plato's spindle comes from the myth of Er at the end of Plato's Republic, where the Spindle of Necessity turns the circles of the heavens.
Form
Two six-line stanzas in short lines of two or three beats, rhyming ABABCC, with feminine rhymes (spindle and dwindle, take it and break it) that give a lilting, song-like sound. Each stanza ends on a clinching couplet.