The Lady's Third Song
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1938. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2034, and this site is served partly from American servers. So for now we give the notes without the full text; it will appear here in 2034.
It begins: When you and my true lover meet
In brief
SummaryThe lady asks her maid to share the lover honourably between them.
The last of the lady's three songs. She speaks to the chambermaid who goes to the lover's bed at night in her place. She asks her not to speak ill of the soul, nor to think the body is everything, since she herself, his lady by daylight, knows the body's evils better. The lover's love is to be split in honour between them, so that neither has enough. Then the song ends in a strange harmony: when the lady kisses him, a serpent seems to hiss; when the maid's hand explores, the heavens sigh.
Lines to remember
A contrapuntal serpent hiss,
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6Daylight lady
The lady imagines the maid and her lover meeting in the dark. She asks the maid neither to despise the soul nor to think the body is the whole of love. She calls herself his "daylight lady", and claims, surprisingly, to know worse evil of the body than the woman who shares his bed.
Lines 7 to 12Serpent and heavens
The lover's love is to be divided in honour until neither woman has enough. The closing couplets reverse what we might expect: the lady's chaste kiss is shadowed by a serpent's hiss, the tempter of Eden, while the maid's frankly sexual touch sets the heavens sighing. The two sounds play against each other like parts in music.
Themes
Body and soul
The whole Three Bushes sequence asks how body and soul share love. Here the lady insists that neither can be dismissed. The final images turn the usual order upside down: sin hides in the spiritual kiss, and heaven answers the bodily touch. Yeats suggests that the two halves of love need each other and are incomplete apart.
Divided love
The lady's plan to "split his love" is presented as honourable, yet the song admits the cost: neither woman will have enough. Love divided between a daylight lady and a night-time substitute becomes a kind of counterpoint, two voices sounding together, rather than a single whole.
Context
First published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938), as one of the songs that follow the ballad "The Three Bushes". The lady has three songs, the lover one and the chambermaid two, each giving a different voice to the same story of a secret substitution in the dark. In these late poems Yeats writes about sexual love with a frankness his early work avoided.
Form
Twelve lines in rhyming couplets of four beats, some with half rhymes ("lady" and "body", "love" and "enough"). The quick, song-like couplets carry a knotty argument, and the last four lines are built as a balanced pair, lady against maid, serpent against heavens.