The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart

A lover longs to remake the ugly world for his beloved.

The poem lists the world's ugly, worn and broken things: a child crying by the road, a cart creaking, a ploughman's heavy steps in wintry mud. All of them, the lover says, wrong the image of his beloved, which "blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart". In the second stanza he longs to rebuild everything, earth, sky and water, into "a casket of gold" fit to hold his dreams of her. The poem is a wish for perfection so strong that ordinary life feels like an insult.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 4The ugly world

   The first line piles up "All things uncomely and broken", and the next two give examples, heard as much as seen: "The cry of a child by the roadway", "the creak of a lumbering cart", a ploughman "splashing the wintry mould". These are "wronging your image", which grows like a rose in his heart.

2. Lines 5 to 8Remaking it

   "The wrong of unshapely things" is "too great to be told". He hungers "to build them anew", sitting apart "on a green knoll", and to remake earth, sky and water "like a casket of gold". The last line repeats the rose image, now enclosed as the treasure in that casket.

Themes

Context

The poem appeared in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899) as "Aedh tells of the Rose in his Heart". Aedh was one of several imagined speakers Yeats used in that book to voice different sides of himself. From 1906 the title became the more general "The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart". The rose, a central symbol of his poems in the 1890s, here stands for the beloved's image and for ideal beauty.

Form

Two quatrains of long, six-beat lines rhymed ABAB. Only two rhyme sounds run through the whole poem ("old", "mould", "told", "gold" and "cart", "heart", "apart"), and both stanzas end on the same phrase. The long lines and heavy rhymes give the poem a slow, incantatory weight.