The Balloon of the Mind
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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
SummaryA writer orders his hands to rein in a wandering mind.
In four lines the speaker gives an order to his own hands: bring the mind in. The mind is a balloon, swollen and tugging in the wind, and it has to be hauled down into its "narrow shed". It is a small picture of the struggle to concentrate, and perhaps of the struggle to fit loose thought into the tight space of a poem.
Lines to remember
Bring the balloon of the mind
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Hauling it in
"Hands, do what you're bid" is a blunt command, as if to workmen. The balloon "bellies and drags in the wind", two heavy verbs that make the mind a clumsy, resisting thing, and the short last line, "Into its narrow shed", brings it to rest in a tight space.
Themes
Mind and body
The hands are asked to control the mind, reversing the usual order in which the mind directs the body. The hands, practical and obedient, "do what you're bid", and they must do the work of discipline that the swelling, wind-blown mind cannot do for itself.
Making a poem
The "narrow shed" can be read as the poem itself, or the page, into which the wide, drifting thoughts have to be packed. Writing is shown as manual labour, a matter of hauling and storing. The poem enacts this: a large image squeezed into four short lines.
Context
The poem was collected in The Wild Swans at Coole (Cuala Press, 1917). It sits among longer poems of love and loss as a brief, wry glance at the poet's own work, and at the effort it takes to get an idea down and hold it.
Form
A single quatrain of short three-beat lines, rhymed abba ("bid" and "shed" a half-rhyme, "mind" and "wind" a full one). The enclosing rhyme closes round the middle lines like the shed round the balloon.
