In the Firelight
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryBy the fire, roasting chestnuts, two people dream of kings and kingdoms.
The speaker invites a companion to sit by the fire, roast chestnuts and dream of "kings and kingdoms". Outside, the "white roads are endless" under mournful stars, and shadows gather round, but they should whisper and not care about "Fortune's furious wheel" turning somewhere beyond. The last stanza sets the whole history of empires, rising and falling, against an hour of dreaming by the grate. The cosy fireside holds the great world at a distance.
Lines to remember
Come and dream of kings and kingdoms,
Kingdoms rising, kingdoms falling,
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Chestnuts and stars
The invitation is to dream while "Cooking chestnuts on the bars" of the grate. Outside, the "white roads are endless", and the repeated "Mournful under mournful stars" makes the dark world beyond the fire feel lonely and huge.
Lines 5 to 8Shadows and Fortune
"Whisper lest we too may sadden": they must keep the sadness out. Shadows "steal" round them like herds of animals, and beyond them spins "Fortune's furious wheel", the old image of luck raising people up and throwing them down. The speaker tells his companion not to care.
Lines 9 to 12Empires weighed
"Kingdoms rising, kingdoms falling, / Bowing nations, plumèd wars" sums up all of history in two lines. Then it is weighed against "an hour of dreaming", and the poem closes, as it began, on chestnuts by the fire.
Themes
Dream and history
The poem sets two scales side by side: the whole rise and fall of kingdoms, and a small hour by the fire. Kings are only things to "dream of", and "plumèd wars" become pictures in the flames. The fireside dream is treated as at least as weighty as the history it dreams about.
Shelter
Warmth and company stand against a sad, endless world: "white roads", "mournful stars", "herds of shadows". The pair must "Whisper lest we too may sadden", as if the gloom might hear them. The fire is a small circle of safety, and the repeated line about chestnuts is its homely sign.
Context
This is one of Yeats's early poems that he did not keep in his collected work, and our text comes from the Standard Ebooks edition of his poetry. Its details of first publication are not confirmed here. The fireside, a favourite setting of his early verse, reappears in "When You Are Old", where another figure bends beside "the glowing bars".
Form
Three quatrains in trochaic metre, four beats to a line with the stress falling first ("Come and dream of kings and kingdoms"). Only the second and fourth lines rhyme ("bars", "stars"; "steal", "wheel"; "wars", "bars"). The last line repeats the second, closing the poem back at the fire.
