The Lover's 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: Bird sighs for the air
In brief
SummaryA tiny song of longing, and the rest that follows love.
The lover's single song in the sequence that follows "The Three Bushes". In six very short lines it names three longings: the bird for the air, the mind for somewhere it cannot name, the seed for the womb. Then one rest settles on all three at once: on the mind, on the nest and on the lovers' bodies. Desire and its satisfaction are held in a single breath.
Lines to remember
On straining thighs.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 3Three longings
Everything sighs for something: the bird for open air, thought for a place beyond knowing, the seed for the womb. The list runs from nature to mind to sex without any sense that one is higher than another.
Lines 4 to 6The same rest
Now the same rest falls on all of them, mind, nest and straining bodies, in the order of the first three lines. The word for the lovers' effort keeps the effort of love present even as it ends in stillness.
Themes
Desire and rest
The poem moves from sighing to rest in two halves. Longing is universal, shared by birds, thoughts and seeds, and so is its end. The satisfaction of love brings a peace that reaches the mind as well as the body, which is the lover's answer to the sequence's worry about separating the two.
Mind and body
Thought and the body are placed side by side, each given one line in the longing and one in the rest. Unlike the lady, the lover does not divide love into soul and flesh: the same rest falls on both.
Context
First published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938), among the songs that follow the ballad "The Three Bushes". In the story the lover believes his lady comes to him at midnight, though it is really her chambermaid. His song, brief and content, stands against the anxious arguments of the lady's three songs.
Form
Six short lines in two matching halves, rhyming AABCCB. Each half has two lines of two or three beats and a closing line that rhymes across the gap with its partner. The tight mirror shape enacts the calm it describes.