Never give all the Heart

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1903from In the Seven Woods14 lines

Never give all the heart, for loveWill hardly seem worth thinking ofTo passionate women if it seemCertain, and they never dreamThat it fades out from kiss to kiss;For everything that’s lovely isBut a brief dreamy kind delight.O never give the heart outright,For they, for all smooth lips can say,Have given their hearts up to the play.And who could play it well enoughIf deaf and dumb and blind with love?He that made this knows all the cost,For he gave all his heart and lost.

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

In brief

Summary

Advice against loving too completely, from a man who did.

The poem opens with blunt advice: never give all your heart. Love that seems "Certain" will hardly interest "passionate women", and it fades "from kiss to kiss"; everything lovely is only "a brief dreamy kind delight". Love is a kind of "play", and a good player keeps his head, while someone "deaf and dumb and blind with love" cannot play it well. The last couplet reveals how the speaker knows all this: "he gave all his heart and lost".

Lines to remember

Never give all the heart, for love

For he gave all his heart and lost.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 7The advice
The first line gives the rule and the next six the reason. Love that seems "Certain" will "hardly seem worth thinking of" to "passionate women", and it fades "from kiss to kiss". Everything lovely, he says, is "But a brief dreamy kind delight".
Lines 8 to 12Love as a play
"O never give the heart outright" repeats the rule. Such women, "for all smooth lips can say", have given their hearts "up to the play", treating love as a performance. Nobody could act it well if "deaf and dumb and blind with love".
Lines 13 to 14The cost
The final couplet changes voice. "He that made this", the poet himself, "knows all the cost", because "he gave all his heart and lost". The plain single-syllable words of the last line make the confession land heavily.

Themes

Love as a game

The poem treats love as a play in which the cool player wins. The women "Have given their hearts up to the play", so they are practised performers, while the lover who is "deaf and dumb and blind with love" cannot keep his part. Holding back becomes a strategy, not a lack of feeling.

Loss

The advice sounds worldly and cynical until the last line. Then it becomes a lesson learned the hard way: "he gave all his heart and lost". The speaker is not a detached adviser but an example of what happens when the rule is broken, and that gives the poem its bitter edge.

Context

Collected in In the Seven Woods (1903), among several poems in that book about love, loss and ageing, such as "The Folly of being Comforted" and "Adam's Curse". It is often read against Yeats's long, unreturned love for Maud Gonne, who married John MacBride in February 1903, the year the book appeared.

Form

Fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but in seven rhyming couplets of short four-beat lines ("kiss" and "is", "say" and "play", "cost" and "lost"). The tight, clipped couplets suit advice that sounds like a proverb, and the switch to "He" in the last couplet works like a signature.