The Pity of Love
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Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryTo love someone is to fear everything that might harm them.
A single sentence of eight lines. At the heart of love, the speaker says, lies a pity beyond words: the fear that everything in the world threatens the one you love. The list of threats is strangely ordinary: people buying and selling, clouds passing, cold wet winds, a shadowy hazel grove by grey water. None is dangerous in itself, and that is the point. Love makes the whole world seem a threat to "the head that I love".
Lines to remember
A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love:
Threaten the head that I love.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 2Pity in love
"A pity beyond all telling / Is hid in the heart of love". The opening states the idea plainly: loving someone brings a tenderness close to grief, hidden at love's centre and too deep to express.
Lines 3 to 8The threatening world
The list runs from human bustle, "The folk who are buying and selling", to clouds, "cold wet winds" and "the shadowy hazel grove / Where mouse-grey waters are flowing". Only the last line gives the verb: they all "Threaten the head that I love". The delay makes the fear arrive with force.
Themes
Love and fear
The poem finds anxiety inside love. Nothing in the list is truly dangerous; it is love that makes the ordinary world, trade, weather, a quiet grove, look like a threat to "the head that I love". The "pity" is the lover's helpless tenderness for someone who cannot be protected from everything.
The ordinary world
The threats mix the human ("buying and selling") with the natural (clouds, winds, "mouse-grey waters"). Set against the single beloved head, the busy, indifferent world seems vast and unfeeling. The small, soft colour of "mouse-grey" makes even the danger feel quiet.
Context
The poem first appeared in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892), among the lyrics Yeats later grouped as "The Rose". It sits next to "The Sorrow of Love" and "When You Are Old", short love poems of the same years that mix tenderness with sadness.
Form
One eight-line sentence rhymed ABABCBCB ("telling" and "selling", "love", "above", "grove", "love"). The lines have three beats with a lilting, dancing rhythm. The main verb is held back until the last line, so the whole poem leans towards "Threaten".
