The Mermaid
The Mermaid
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryA mermaid's joyful embrace drowns the young man she loves.
A tiny fable, the third poem in "A Man Young and Old". A mermaid finds a swimming lad, picks him for her own, presses her body to his and plunges down laughing. In her "cruel happiness" she forgets "That even lovers drown". The poem says in six lines what the sequence has been circling: love can destroy the one it seizes, without meaning any harm.
Lines to remember
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6Plunging down
The verbs come fast: "found", "Picked", "Pressed", "Laughed", "plunging". The mermaid acts on pure delight, and the semicolon after "Laughed" is the moment before the dive. The last line is quiet and terrible: in "cruel happiness" she forgets "That even lovers drown".
Themes
Love as danger
The mermaid does not hate the lad; she loves him, and that is what kills him. "Cruel happiness" joins joy and cruelty in one phrase. Coming after the cold, stony woman of "First Love", this is the opposite danger: a love so eager and careless that it drags the beloved down.
Two worlds
She belongs to the sea and he does not. What is natural for her, "plunging down", is death for him. The word "even" is the key: she forgets that lovers, for all their passion, are still mortal and cannot follow a creature of another element.
Context
"The Mermaid" is the third poem in "A Man Young and Old", first collected in The Tower (Macmillan, 1928). It is the shortest poem in the sequence, and it stands between the cold, moon-like woman of the first two poems and the memory of wildness in "The Death of the Hare".
Form
A single six-line stanza in ballad metre, with longer and shorter lines alternating and the short lines rhyming ("own", "down", "drown"). The compact shape, like a folk song, lets the story move from finding to drowning in a single breath.
