O do not Love Too Long

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1906from In the Seven Woods12 lines

Sweetheart, do not love too long:I loved long and long,And grew to be out of fashionLike an old song.

All through the years of our youthNeither could have knownTheir own thought from the other’s,We were so much at one.

But, O in a minute she changed⁠—O do not love too long,Or you will grow out of fashionLike an old song.

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

In brief

Summary

A jilted lover warns a sweetheart against loving for too long.

The speaker gives a warning drawn from his own life: do not love too long. He loved "long and long" and grew "out of fashion", left behind "Like an old song". Through their youth he and the woman he loved were so close that neither could tell their own thoughts from the other's. Then, "in a minute", she changed. The last stanza repeats the opening warning, now weighted with that sudden loss.

Lines to remember

Sweetheart, do not love too long:

Like an old song.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 4The warning
He speaks to a "Sweetheart" and offers advice from experience. His own long love has left him outdated, "Like an old song" that no one sings any more. The short lines make the warning sound light, almost a ditty, though the feeling beneath it is not.
Lines 5 to 8So much at one
He remembers the years of their youth, when the two were so close that neither "could have known / Their own thought from the other's". The line "We were so much at one" is the poem's picture of perfect union.
Lines 9 to 12She changed
"But, O in a minute she changed": years of closeness undone in an instant. The line breaks off, and the warning from the first stanza returns almost word for word, now addressed as a threat: "Or you will grow out of fashion".

Themes

Love and loss

The poem sets long, faithful love against a moment of change. "All through the years of our youth" they were one; "in a minute she changed". The imbalance is the whole grief: loyalty that lasted years counts for nothing when the other person moves on.

Being out of date

The poem's central image is growing "out of fashion" like "an old song". Constant love, which should be a virtue, has made him old-fashioned, left behind like a tune people have tired of. The comparison is gentle and wry, and it turns his heartbreak into something almost comic.

Context

The poem is printed with the In the Seven Woods poems, though it was not in the first edition of that book in 1903. It is one of several short lyrics of these years about love that is lost or unreturned, often read in the light of Maud Gonne's marriage to John MacBride in 1903.

Form

Three short quatrains in lines of two to three beats. Only the second and fourth lines rhyme ("long" and "song", "known" and "one"). The first and last stanzas nearly repeat each other, so the poem is framed by its warning like a song with a refrain, and the dash that breaks line 9 marks the sudden change.