The Three Bushes
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: Said lady once to lover
In brief
SummaryA lady sends her maid to her lover's bed; three rose bushes mingle.
A ballad of love, chastity and substitution. A lady fears her poet lover's love will starve and his songs dry up, yet she dreads losing her chastity. So she arranges for her chambermaid to lie with him each midnight in the dark, while he believes it is his lady. The plan runs for a year. Then, hurrying to his tryst, the lover is thrown when his horse puts its hoof in a rabbit-hole, and dies; the lady, seeing it, drops dead too. The maid tends their graves and plants two rose bushes whose blooms merge as if from one root. When she dies, a wise priest has her buried beside the lover with a rose-tree of her own, and no one can now tell where the roots began.
Lines to remember
Know where its roots began.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 7Love needs food
The lady tells her lover that no one can rely on a love that lacks its proper food. If his love died, how could he go on singing love songs, and she would be blamed. The practical logic of the opening drives the whole story.
Lines 8 to 14No candles
She asks him to keep his room dark so that she can creep into his bed at midnight. If she saw herself doing it, she says, she would drop dead of shame. The darkness that protects her modesty also makes the trick possible.
Lines 15 to 28The chambermaid's part
She confides in her chambermaid: she loves a man in secret, and would die if he stopped loving her, yet would die too if she lost her chastity. So the maid must lie beside him and let him think it is her mistress. Perhaps, the lady reasons, all women are the same in the dark, stripped bare.
Lines 29 to 35A lucky thought
No dogs bark, the midnights chime, and the lady congratulates herself on her clever idea, since her lover looks so happy. Yet she sighs when the chambermaid looks half asleep all day. The small detail hints at jealousy and at what she is missing.
Lines 36 to 49The last song
A year on, the lover refuses to sing one more song because he must be in bed when the clock chimes, as on the first night. His song is called laughing, crying, sacred and lecherous all at once. Then he rides a race such as no man ever rode before.
Lines 50 to 56Two deaths
His horse puts its hoof in a rabbit-hole and he falls on his head and dies. The lady sees it all and drops dead on the spot, because she loved him with her soul. The ballad tells the tragedy in a few flat, sudden lines.
Lines 57 to 63The rose bushes
The chambermaid lives long and cares for their graves, planting a bush on each. When the bushes grow large, their roses merge so completely that they seem to spring from a single root. Soul and body, lady and lover, are joined in the growing plants.
Lines 64 to 77The third bush
Old and dying, the maid makes a full confession. The priest looks long in her face and, being a good man, understands. He has her buried beside the lover with a rose-tree on her grave, so that now no one who plucks a rose there can tell whose root it grew from.
Themes
Body and soul
The lady gives the lover her soul, the maid gives him her body, and he believes he has one woman. The story tests whether love can be split that way. The ending answers with the roses: in death the three are mingled, and no one can tell "where its roots began". Soul and body turn out to be parts of one love.
Chastity and desire
The lady cannot give up either her chastity or her lover, and her plan protects both at someone else's cost. The poem is not solemn about it. Her sighs at the tired maid and the song called both "sacred" and "leching" show desire breaking through her careful arrangement.
Forgiveness
The priest in the last stanzas is the poem's quiet hero. He hears the maid's confession, understands her case and, instead of condemning her, has her buried beside the man she lay with. The ballad ends by blessing the whole strange triangle rather than judging it.
Context
First published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938), where it is followed by six songs in the voices of the lady, the lover and the chambermaid. Yeats presented the tale with a mock-scholarly subtitle claiming it came from an old French chronicle, a pretence rather than a real source.
The poem came out of Yeats's friendship with the poet Dorothy Wellesley in the mid-1930s. As far as is known, the two agreed to write ballads on the same story, and her version was published too. Yeats's late interest in the ballad as a popular, singable form also shows in the Broadsides he edited with her.
Form
Eleven seven-line stanzas: six lines in ballad measure, alternating four and three beats and rhyming on the even lines (with half rhymes such as "came" and "room"), then the refrain. The refrain's repeated endearment, sounding after comedy and tragedy alike, gives the story the feel of a folk song sung aloud.