The Lover speaks to the Hearers of his Songs in Coming Days

A dead poet asks future women to pray for his sinful love songs.

The speaker imagines himself long dead. Women of a future time kneel at the altar rails, and his love songs, still in their minds, "hide the prayer"; the smoke of his "dead heart" drifts through the church and covers the incense. He asks them to pray for "all that sin I wove in song", until the Virgin Mary, "the Attorney for Lost Souls", calls to him and his beloved that they need wander no longer among the penitent dead. It is a confession, but also a confident claim that his songs will still be heard.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 4In a future church

   He addresses women "kneeling by your altar rails long hence". His songs are so present in their minds that they "hide the prayer", and the smoke from his "dead heart" covers "the smoke of myrrh and frankincense". Love poetry crowds out worship, even after his death.

2. Lines 5 to 8A prayer for the lovers

   He asks the women to "Bend down and pray" for the sin in his songs. He hopes for the moment when "the Attorney for Lost Souls", the Virgin Mary pleading for sinners, will call to both lovers to "No longer fly" among the "hovering, piteous, penitential throng".

Themes

Context

In The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) the poem was "Hanrahan speaks to the Lovers of his Songs in coming Days", spoken by Red Hanrahan, the wandering poet of Yeats's stories, and it began "O, colleens, kneeling by your altar rails long hence". Later versions made the speaker a nameless lover and changed the Irish "colleens" (girls) to "women", loosening the tie to Hanrahan.

Form

Eight long lines of six stresses, in two quatrains rhymed abba cddc ("hence", "prayer", "air", "frankincense"; "song", "cry", "fly", "throng"). The long, rolling lines suit a prayer or a chant, and the enclosing rhymes make each half feel complete.