Maid Quiet
Earlier titled "Hanrahan laments because of his Wanderings"
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Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryWhen Maid Quiet leaves him, a storm rushes into the speaker's blood.
Quiet is imagined as a young woman in a "russet hood", and she has gone. With her absence, the winds that woke the stars are blowing through his blood. He wonders how he could have stayed so calm when she rose to leave, and now words that "called up the lightning" are rushing through his heart. In eight short lines the poem turns a mood into a person, and her going into an inner storm.
Lines to remember
Where has Maid Quiet gone to,
Are blowing through my blood.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4She has gone
The opening question makes Quiet a figure you might meet on a road, "Nodding her russet hood". Her absence is felt at once: "The winds that awakened the stars" are now "blowing through my blood". Cosmic wind and the human pulse become one.
Lines 5 to 8The storm inside
He looks back, puzzled at his own calm "When she rose up to depart", and that calm has left with her. Lightning follows the wind: "words that called up the lightning" are "hurtling through my heart". The run of h sounds in the last line makes it hurry.
Themes
Peace and passion
Quiet and storm divide the poem. Quiet is gentle and homely, dressed in russet; what she leaves behind is wind and lightning. The poem never says what the "words" are, only that they once "called up the lightning", which suggests spells, passion or poetry. Losing quiet means being taken over by forces far bigger than himself.
Moods as persons
Maid Quiet has a hood, she nods, she rises and departs. Picturing calm as a woman makes its loss feel like a desertion, and shows that the speaker cannot command his own peace of mind: it comes and goes like a visitor. The same figure wanders "laughing" through the later poem "In the Seven Woods".
Context
In The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) this poem was called "Hanrahan laments because of his Wanderings", and was given to Red Hanrahan, the wandering Gaelic poet of Yeats's stories. From 1906 it became "Maid Quiet", and it was rewritten so heavily that the two versions share only about 40 per cent of their words.
Form
Eight lines of three beats, where only the even lines rhyme ("hood" and "blood", "depart" and "heart"). Each half has the same shape: a picture of Quiet, then a violent force rushing inside him. The parallel lines beginning "The winds that" and "Now words that" tie the two halves together.
Retitled and revised: 'Hanrahan laments because of his Wanderings' (1899, Gutenberg 32233) became 'Maid Quiet' (1906 on). The texts share only about 40 per cent of their words.