The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love

A new love ends when she sees another woman in his heart.

In seven short lines a man tells how a love affair ended. He had "a beautiful friend" and hoped that his "old despair" would at last end in love. But one day she looked into his heart and saw another woman's image there, and she went away weeping. The poem opens with a fragment of the friend's remembered beauty, "Pale brows, still hands and dim hair", and is addressed, strikingly, to the woman whose image drove her away.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 4Hope of a cure

   The opening phrase has no verb: it is a remembered portrait. He had "a beautiful friend" and dreamed that "the old despair", a long unhappy love, "Would end in love in the end", the doubled "end" sounding like a sigh.

2. Lines 5 to 7Your image

   The turn is sudden. She looked into his heart and "saw your image was there". That "your" shows who he is really speaking to: the old love who never left. The friend "has gone weeping away", and the poem stops at once.

Themes

Context

The poem was collected in The Wind Among the Reeds (Elkin Mathews, London, 1899) as "Aedh Laments the Loss of Love". Aedh was one of several named speakers Yeats used in that book; from 1906 the title became "The Lover mourns for the Loss of Love", making the speaker any lover.

It is usually read as a poem about Olivia Shakespear, the novelist Yeats met in 1894, whose love affair with him began in 1896 and ended in 1897. The image she found in his heart is taken to be that of Maud Gonne, whom he had loved since 1889. Yeats and Shakespear stayed close friends until her death in 1938.

Form

Seven short lines of three beats, rhymed ababcac ("hair", "friend", "despair", "end", "day", "there", "away"). The "hair" sound of the first line returns in "there", so the lost friend's portrait and the other woman's image are tied together by rhyme.