The Heart of the Woman
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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 woman leaves her safe home and her prayers for a lover.
A woman speaks after leaving home for a lover. She asks what the "little room" of prayer and rest means to her now, since he called her out "into the gloom" and she lies against his breast. Her mother's care and the warm, safe house count for nothing either; her own hair will shelter them both "from the bitter storm". In the last stanza she is beyond "life and death", her heart on his heart and her breath "mixed into his breath". The poem is short, intense and wholly given over to her choice.
Lines to remember
The shadowy blossom of my hair
My breath is mixed into his breath.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4The little room
"O what to me" dismisses her old life in a phrase. The room was "brimmed up with prayer and rest", a place of safety and religion, but he "bade me out into the gloom". The stanza ends in the present, with her breast upon his.
Lines 5 to 8Mother and house
The same question sweeps aside her mother's care and "The house where I was safe and warm". In their place she offers a new shelter: "The shadowy blossom of my hair" will hide the lovers from the storm, a soft, dark image of her own protection.
Lines 9 to 12Beyond life and death
She addresses her own "hiding hair and dewy eyes" and says she is "no more with life and death", as if love has taken her outside ordinary life. The last two lines mirror each other, heart on heart and breath into breath, until the lovers seem to become one.
Themes
Love as surrender
The woman gives up everything for love and does not look back. Each stanza begins with "O", and the first two ask "what to me" the things she has left. The ending is total: "My breath is mixed into his breath". Love here is not courtship but a complete loss of self, which she welcomes rather than fears.
Safety and danger
Her old life is all shelter: the "little room", prayer, rest, a mother's care, a house "safe and warm". Her new life is "the gloom" and "the bitter storm". Yet she chooses the storm, and makes her own shelter from it with "The shadowy blossom of my hair". The poem reverses the usual sense of where safety lies.
A woman's voice
Most of the love poems in the book are spoken by a man to a woman; this one is spoken by a woman about a man. She is the one who acts and decides, while he appears only as a call "out into the gloom" and a breast to lie on. Her hair, usually praised by the lover in these poems, becomes her own means of protection.
Context
The poem was collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (Elkin Mathews, London, 1899). Much of that book is about hair, dew, twilight and a love that seems to lead out of the everyday world, and this lyric uses those images in their simplest form. It is one of the few poems in the collection spoken in a woman's voice.
Form
Three quatrains of four-beat lines, rhymed abab ("room", "rest", "gloom", "breast"). Each stanza opens with "O", which gives the poem the sound of a cry or a song. The balanced last two lines, heart upon heart and breath into breath, draw the lovers together in the very shape of the verse.
