His Confidence
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: Undying love to buy
In brief
SummaryA man insists that love springs anew even from a broken heart.
To buy undying love, the man says, he wrote every wrong he had suffered on the corners of his eye, in the lines of age and grief. No payment could be too great for such love. He struck so hard that he broke his heart in two. But it does not matter: he knows that love leaps out of rock, out of a desolate source, and runs on its course.
Lines to remember
Love leaps upon its course.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6The price of love
He has paid for undying love by writing all the wrongs done to him on the corners of his eye, as wrinkles and marks of sorrow. He asks what payment could ever be enough.
Lines 7 to 12Out of rock
He broke his own heart with the force of his striking. He shrugs it off, because love, like a spring struck from rock, leaps from the most desolate source and flows on.
Themes
Love from suffering
The poem's confidence is that pain feeds love. The broken heart becomes the rock from which water leaps, an image that recalls Moses striking the rock in the desert. A "desolate source" is where love begins, not where it ends.
Answering fear
The poem replies to "Her Anxiety", where the woman fears that love must die. He answers not by denying that love wounds, but by trusting that love renews itself, as the earth does in spring.
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 is the male answer to the poem before it, "Her Anxiety".
Form
Two six-line stanzas in short lines of two or three beats, rhyming ABABCC with half rhymes (upon and done, struck and rock). The final couplet of the second stanza, about love leaping on its course, has the most movement, matching its image of a released stream.