The Dedication to a Book of Stories selected from the Irish Novelists

A book of Irish stories offered to exiles as a healing bell branch.

The poem opens with a legend: in old Ireland a green branch hung with bells brought "A Druid kindness" to all who heard it, charming the merchant from his tricks and lulling armies to sleep. Then the speaker turns to Irish exiles, restless and still plotting against "ancestral Sorrow", and offers them his own bell branch: this book of stories. He tore it, he says, from "the barren boughs of Eire", a country that can batter a man until he is loveless. Yet its bells, merry or sad, will bring back memories of home, of places untouched by "our bitterness".

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 4The old bell branch

   In the days "When her own people ruled this tragic Eire", a green branch hung with bells shed "A Druid kindness" on all who heard it. The murmur of the bells blends with "greenness" and "calm of faery" into one peaceful image.

2. Lines 5 to 8Its magic

   The branch charms the merchant from "his guile", turns the farmer's thoughts from his cattle and hushes "the roaring ranks of battle". Its power is gentle and brief: "all grew friendly for a little while". The modest last line keeps the legend from sounding grand.

3. Lines 9 to 12To the exiles

   The speaker turns to Irish "Exiles", scattered "over lands and seas" and still planning for a day that might "set a stone upon ancestral Sorrow", a gravestone on old grief. He offers them what the legend offered: "I also bear a bell branch full of ease."

4. Lines 13 to 20Torn from Eire

   Twice he says "I tore it", from wind-tossed boughs and from "the barren boughs of Eire". The sentence runs over the stanza break into a bitter list, a man "battered, badgered and destroyed" until he is "a loveless man". Then the bells return: merry ones shake cobwebs from the rafters, but "the saddest chimes are best enjoyed".

5. Lines 21 to 24Memories of home

   Merry or sad, the bells bring memories of "half-forgotten innocent old places". The last lines offer a quiet comfort: human bitterness has "left no traces" on "Munster grass and Connemara skies". The land itself stays clean of the quarrels of its people.

Themes

Context

Yeats wrote the poem as the dedication to Representative Irish Tales (1891), an anthology of stories by nineteenth-century Irish novelists that he selected and introduced. It then appeared in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), in the group of lyrics later called "The Rose". Yeats revised it substantially in 1925, and the text here is the later version.

The bell branch comes from Irish legend, where a branch hung with small bells could be shaken to bring calm or sleep to those who heard it. The poem turns that old image into a way of describing what a book of stories can do for readers far from home.

Form

Six quatrains in iambic pentameter, rhymed ABBA, some with loose or half-rhymes ("Eire" and "faery", "memories" and "skies"). Many inner rhymes are two-syllable, falling endings ("cattle", "battle"; "laughter", "rafter"). In the second half one long sentence runs from stanza four into stanza six, so the feeling about Ireland spills over the poem's neat divisions.