Memory
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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
SummaryOne woman's imprint stays in a man's mind like a hare's form.
Other women had a lovely face, or charm, but it made no difference. The mind keeps the shape of one woman only, as mountain grass keeps the hollow where a hare has lain. The poem is a single sentence of six short lines, and all its feeling is carried by that last country image.
Lines to remember
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6The hare's form
He counts off the others: one with "a lovely face", "two or three" with charm, all "in vain". The reason comes as an image, not an argument: the grass "Cannot but keep the form / Where the mountain hare has lain". The pressed grass holds a shape long after the hare has gone.
Themes
Lasting love
The poem explains faithfulness without mentioning love at all. "Cannot but keep" makes it involuntary: the grass has no choice, and nor does he. Beauty and charm in others are "in vain" because the space is already shaped by someone else.
Absence
What the grass keeps is not the hare but the mark of the hare: a hollow, an absence. The woman is not present in the poem, only the imprint she has left, which is what the title means by "Memory".
Context
The poem was collected in The Wild Swans at Coole, published by the Cuala Press in 1917. The woman is not named; it is usually read as another of the book's poems about Maud Gonne, whom Yeats had loved since 1889. It is one of the shortest poems in the book, and one of several that look back on a love that has outlasted youth.
Form
Six lines of about three beats, rhyming ABCABC with half-rhymes ("face" and "grass", "charm" and "form", "vain" and "lain"). The slightly mismatched rhymes keep the tone plain and unforced, and the full rhyme saved for the end, "lain", closes the poem softly.