The End of Day

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1917from The Wild Swans at Coole8 lines

She is playing like a childAnd penance is the play,Fantastical and wildBecause the end of dayShows her that some one soonWill come from the house, and say⁠—Though play is but half-done⁠—“Come in and leave the play.”⁠—

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

In brief

Summary

The dying lady plays like a child who knows bedtime is near.

She is playing like a child, and the game is penance. Her play is wild and fantastic because the end of the day is coming: she knows that soon someone will come from the house and call, though the game is only half done, "Come in and leave the play." The whole poem is one sentence, and the call to come in is a gentle image of death.

Lines to remember

She is playing like a child

"Come in and leave the play."

Line by line

Lines 1 to 4Penance as play
"Penance is the play" is a startling phrase: her religious discipline, or her suffering, is turned into a child's game. She plays "Fantastical and wild" precisely because the light is going.
Lines 5 to 8Called indoors
Every child knows the call from the house at dusk. Here it comes "Though play is but half-done", which quietly admits that her life is ending early. The words "Come in and leave the play" are kind, not frightening.

Themes

Death as bedtime

Death is pictured as the end of a child's day: someone "from the house" calls her in. The image makes dying familiar and even tender, while "Though play is but half-done" keeps the sadness of a life cut short. The caller is unnamed, simply "some one" from the house.

Playfulness

As elsewhere in the sequence, the lady meets illness with play. Even penance, the most solemn of acts, becomes a game played "Fantastical and wild", and the approaching end only makes her play harder. The poem admires this without explaining it, as a child's game is watched rather than analysed.

Context

This is the fourth poem of "Upon a Dying Lady", collected in The Wild Swans at Coole (Cuala Press, 1917). The lady is usually identified as Mabel Beardsley. The poem's childlike picture echoes the dolls and toys of the two poems before it.

Form

Eight short three-beat lines rhymed ababcbcb, with the same sound running through "play", "day", "say" and "play" again. The repeated rhyme gives the poem the feel of a children's game or a nursery song, closing on the word it began with.