The Lover pleads with his Friend for Old Friends
Earlier titled "The Poet pleads with his Friend for old Friends"
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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 lover asks an admired woman not to forget her old friends.
The woman addressed is in her "shining days", surrounded by admiring voices and new friends. The speaker asks her not to become unkind or proud, and to think first of her old friends. His reason is blunt: time will rise like a "bitter flood", and her beauty will be lost to everyone except the one who has always looked at her with love. Behind the gentle request lies a claim: only "these eyes" will still see her beauty when others have stopped looking.
Lines to remember
Time's bitter flood will rise,
For all eyes but these eyes.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Her shining days
The first half sets the scene: she is admired, with "Voices among the crowd" and "new friends busy with your praise". The word "busy" hints that the praise is shallow. He asks only that she "Be not unkind or proud".
Lines 5 to 8Time's flood
Now comes the reason to remember "old friends". "Time's bitter flood will rise", and her beauty will "perish and be lost" to all eyes "but these eyes". The stress on "these" in the last line makes a quiet, possessive claim: his love is the one that will last.
Themes
Loyalty
The poem sets old friends against new. The crowd's praise is loud and "busy"; the old friend's love is quieter and older. By asking her to "think about old friends the most", the speaker is also pleading for himself, and the title makes his position plain: he is "The Lover", not simply a friend.
Beauty and time
The warning in lines 6 to 8 is the one Yeats gives in "When You Are Old": beauty fades, and admirers go with it. "Time's bitter flood" is a harsh, sweeping image. Against it he sets constancy: when the crowd has turned away, "these eyes" will still see what she was.
Context
Published in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) as "The Poet pleads with his Friend for old Friends"; the later title changes "Poet" to "Lover". It belongs to the group of short love poems in that book that speak to a beloved from a distance, pleading, warning or consoling.
Form
Eight lines alternating four and three beats, rhymed abab cdcd ("days", "crowd", "praise", "proud"), with "most" and "lost" a half rhyme. The short, ballad-like lines keep the plea simple and direct, and the last line closes on the repeated word "eyes".
