Love Song

W. B. Yeatsfrom Early and uncollected poems9 lines

From the Gaelic

My love, we will go, we will go, I and you,And away in the woods we will scatter the dew;And the salmon behold, and the ousel too,My love, we will hear, I and you, we will hear,The calling afar of the doe and the deer.And the bird in the branches will cry for us clear,And the cuckoo unseen in his festival mood;And death, oh my fair one, will never come nearIn the bosom afar of the fragrant wood.

Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.

In brief

Summary

A lover invites his beloved away to the woods, where death cannot come.

Subtitled "From the Gaelic", this short song is a lover's invitation. He promises his love that the two of them will go away into the woods, scatter the dew, watch the salmon and the blackbird, and hear deer calling in the distance. The birds will sing for them and the cuckoo will be in "his festival mood". The last lines make the largest promise of all: in the heart of the "fragrant wood", death will never come near. The music is simple and swinging, like a folk song.

Lines to remember

My love, we will go, we will go, I and you,

And death, oh my fair one, will never come near

Line by line

Lines 1 to 3Away to the woods
"We will go, we will go, I and you": the repetitions give the eager, tumbling sound of a spoken invitation. The woods are fresh and alive, with dew to scatter, salmon in the water and the "ousel", or blackbird.
Lines 4 to 6Sounds of the wood
Now the promise is of things heard: the "calling afar of the doe and the deer" and a bird that "will cry for us clear". The lovers are at the centre of the scene, as if nature performs for them.
Lines 7 to 9Beyond death
The cuckoo, heard but "unseen", is in a holiday mood. Then the song makes its boldest claim, addressed to "my fair one": death will never come near them "In the bosom afar of the fragrant wood". The woods become a place outside time.

Themes

Love and escape

Love here means going away together. Every line looks forward ("we will go", "we will hear"), and the destination is a wood far from other people. As in "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", the imagined place is richer than any real one, and the promise that death "will never come near" shows it is a dream as much as a plan.

Nature

The poem is a catalogue of wild things: dew, salmon, ousel, doe and deer, the bird in the branches, the cuckoo. They are named simply, as in a folk song, and together they make the wood feel crowded with life, the opposite of the death it shuts out.

Context

This is one of Yeats's early poems that he did not keep in his collected work. The subtitle "From the Gaelic" presents it as a version of an Irish-language love song, one of several early pieces in which the young Yeats reworked Irish songs and stories in English. It was printed in his first book of poems, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889).

Form

Nine lines in three groups of three, rhymed AAA BBB CBC ("you", "dew", "too"; "hear", "deer", "clear"). The lines have four strong beats with a lilting, galloping rhythm of two light syllables between stresses, which gives the poem the swing of a song meant to be sung.