The Empty Cup
The Empty Cup
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryA man finds the cup of love too late, and it is dry.
The fifth poem of "A Man Young and Old". It starts as a parable: a crazy man dying of thirst found a cup, but hardly dared to wet his mouth, afraid that another mouthful would burst his heart. Then the speaker speaks for himself. "October last" he found the cup too, but it was "dry as bone", and that is why he is crazed and cannot sleep. The young man was too afraid to drink; the older man finds nothing left.
Lines to remember
A crazy man that found a cup,
October last I found it too
But found it dry as bone,
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6Afraid to drink
The "crazy man", "all but dead of thirst", finds a cup and hardly dares taste it, "Imagining, moon accursed", that one more mouthful would make "his beating heart" burst. Love is so overwhelming to the young that they fear it will kill them, and so they barely drink.
Lines 7 to 10Dry as bone
The turn is sharp and personal: "October last I found it too". But the cup was "dry as bone". The first man was crazed by too much; this one is "crazed" by nothing, and "my sleep is gone". The short, flat final line shows an older man's desire with nothing to meet it.
Themes
Missed chances
The two halves of the poem are two stages of life. When the cup was full, fear stopped him drinking; when he dares at last, it is empty. The poem does not moralise about this. It simply sets "Hardly dared to wet his mouth" beside "found it dry as bone" and lets the gap between them speak.
Desire and age
Age does not end longing. The speaker is still thirsty, still "crazed", still sleepless; only the chance of satisfying it has gone. "Moon accursed" links his state to the moon-madness of earlier poems in the sequence: love is a lunacy that lasts even when there is nothing left to drink.
Context
"The Empty Cup" is the fifth poem in "A Man Young and Old", first collected in The Tower (Macmillan, 1928). It marks the turn in the sequence from youth to age: the poems before it are about young love, and those after it are spoken by an old man remembering.
Form
Ten lines in one stanza, in ballad metre: four-beat lines alternating with three-beat ones, with the short lines rhyming ("thirst", "accursed", "burst"; "bone", "gone"). The first six lines tell the parable and the last four apply it, so the shape of the poem is its argument.