The Meditation of the Old Fisherman

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1889from Crossways12 lines

You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart;In the Junes that were warmer than these are, the waves were more gay,When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.

The herring are not in the tides as they were of old;My sorrow! for many a creak gave the creel in the cartThat carried the take to Sligo town to be sold,When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.

And ah, you proud maiden, you are not so fair when his oarIs heard on the water, as they were, the proud and apart,Who paced in the eve by the nets on the pebbly shore,When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.

Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.

In brief

Summary

An old fisherman insists everything was better when he was young.

An old fisherman watches the waves dancing at his feet and finds them less lovely than the waves of his boyhood. In each stanza he compares the present with the past: the Junes were warmer then, the herring more plentiful, the creels creaking under heavy catches on the way to Sligo town, and the girls on the shore prouder and fairer than the young woman in front of him now. Every stanza ends with the same line: "When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart." The poem is gently comic, since the change lies mostly in him, and gently sad.

Lines to remember

When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.

You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,

Line by line

Lines 1 to 4The waves
He speaks to the waves, which "dance by my feet like children at play", glowing, glancing, purring and darting. Lively as they are, the waves of his youth, in "Junes that were warmer", were "more gay". The refrain gives the real reason: his heart then had "never a crack".
Lines 5 to 8The herring
The herring are not in the tides "as they were of old". He remembers the creak of the creel in the cart carrying the catch "to Sligo town to be sold". The sound of that heavy basket is a memory of plenty, and of working life.
Lines 9 to 12The proud maidens
Finally he addresses a "proud maiden", listening for "his oar" on the water. She is not so fair, he tells her, as the proud girls who once walked by the nets "on the pebbly shore". The refrain comes a third time, now plainly the heart of the matter.

Themes

Age and memory

Everything the old man sees is measured against his boyhood and found lacking: the waves, the fishing, the girls. The refrain, "When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart", shows that the change is in him. The world is still beautiful; he no longer feels it as he did.

A working coast

The poem is rooted in a real fishing life: herring in the tides, a creel creaking in the cart, the catch sold in Sligo town, nets on "the pebbly shore". These plain details give the old man's regret a solid, local weight, far from the dreamlands of other early poems.

Context

The poem was first collected in The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (London, January 1889), and Yeats later placed it among the early lyrics he called "Crossways". It is one of the few poems of the group set among working people in the Sligo he knew from childhood, naming Sligo town directly as the place where the herring catch was sold.

Form

Three quatrains in long, lilting lines of mostly five beats, with a quick, skipping rhythm ("Though you glow and you glance, though you purr and you dart"). The first and third lines rhyme within each stanza, while every second and fourth line rhymes on the same sound, "dart", "cart", "apart", "heart". The unchanging refrain gives the poem the feel of an old man's repeated saying.