His Wildness
His Wildness
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryAn old man longs to fly off and grieve alone among the clouds.
The tenth poem of "A Man Young and Old". The old man asks to be sent up among the storm clouds, because the women he loved, "Peg and Meg and Paris' love", are gone, and those who remain have "changed their silk for sack". Up there, with no one to hear, he would let out a peacock cry, as a man who lives in memory naturally would. Alone, he would "nurse a stone / And sing it lullaby": he takes on both the madnesses he laughed at in "The Friends of his Youth".
Lines to remember
O bid me mount and sail up there
Have changed their silk for sack.
Being all alone I'd nurse a stone
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6Up to the clouds
"O bid me mount and sail up there / Amid the cloudy wrack": he wants to leave the earth. "Peg and Meg and Paris' love", the beauty who "had so straight a back", are gone, and the survivors have "changed their silk for sack": fine clothes for rough cloth, youth for age.
Lines 7 to 12Peacock and stone
With "none to hear", he would "have a peacock cry", like Peter, since that is "natural to a man / That lives in memory". And "Being all alone I'd nurse a stone", like Madge. The internal rhymes ("alone" and "stone") give the close the chime of a lullaby.
Themes
Loss and loneliness
Everyone he loved has gone or changed. The run of names, "Peg and Meg and Paris' love", sounds almost like a nursery rhyme, but it is a roll call of the lost, and the survivors have exchanged "silk for sack". His wish to "mount and sail up there" is a wish to be alone with his grief, where "none" can hear.
Madness as release
In "The Friends of his Youth" he laughed at Peter's peacock shriek and Madge's stone. Now he wants both for himself. A man "That lives in memory" finds these wild gestures "natural". The title, "His Wildness", suggests that for the old, a kind of madness may be the only true answer to loss.
Context
"His Wildness" is the tenth poem in "A Man Young and Old", first collected in The Tower (Macmillan, 1928). It is the last spoken by the old man: the sequence closes with a chorus from Sophocles, "From Oedipus at Colonus". "Paris' love" is Helen of Troy, the figure Yeats had long used for Maud Gonne, and she is usually read here as another reminder of her.
Form
Two six-line stanzas in ballad metre, four-beat lines alternating with three-beat lines, with the short lines rhyming ("wrack", "back", "sack"; "cry", "memory", "lullaby"). Internal rhymes ("away" and "stay", "there" and "hear", "alone" and "stone") give the poem a singing, half-crazed music.