In a Drawing-Room

Drawing-room chatter set beside an ancient marble bust and deeper feeling.

Two short stanzas. In the first, the poet looks away from the chatter and laughter of the people around him to an ancient Greek bust smiling quietly in a dim alcove. The living talkers are "lips of dust"; the stone has a "patient beauty". In the second, he names a man's two true companions, both spiritual: Sorrow, which rewards him with freedom, and joy, whose touch makes even the lightest things holy.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 4Chatter and stone

   Around "the twitter of the lips of dust", mortal people talking, a laugh tosses between red lips. Across the room an "Attic bust", an old Greek head, smiles and hides in the alcove's dimness. Quick, noisy life is set beside the long patience of art.

2. Lines 5 to 8Two true friends

   Turning from the room, he names the "Two spirit things" a man has for friends. Sorrow gives "for guerdon liberty", freedom as its reward, and joy lends "To lightest of light things all sanctity". Both are inner experiences, unlike the social talk around him.

Themes

Context

This is one of the early poems that Yeats left out of his later collections. Its setting is unusual for him: a room full of polite company rather than a wood, a shore or a legend. The contrast between the brief life of talk and the calm permanence of an ancient sculpture looks forward to his much later poems about art outlasting its makers.

Form

Two quatrains of five-beat lines rhyming ABAB ("dust" and "bust", "friends" and "lends"). The first stanza is a picture, the second a statement, like a scene followed by its moral. Old-fashioned words such as "'bides", "hath" and "guerdon" give it a formal, slightly antique sound.