The Travail of Passion

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1899from The Wind Among the Reeds8 lines

When the flaming lute-thronged angelic door is wide;When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the wayCrowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side,The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream;We will bend down and loosen our hair over you,That it may drop faint perfume, and be heavy with dew,Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

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

In brief

Summary

The suffering of love is pictured through Christ's Passion, then comforted.

When the door of heaven opens and "an immortal passion" enters human flesh, the speakers say, our hearts must suffer as Christ did: the scourge, the crown of thorns, the road of bitter faces, the wounds, the sponge of vinegar. The last three lines turn to consolation. "We" will bend over the one who suffers and loosen our hair, so that it drops perfume and dew, like "Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream". The poem borrows the language of the Passion to show what great love does to mortal people, and answers pain with tenderness.

Lines to remember

When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay;

Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 5The Passion
Two "When" clauses open the poem: heaven's "flaming lute-thronged angelic door" stands wide, and a passion "breathes in mortal clay". Then come the stages of Christ's suffering: "the scourge, the plaited thorns", the crowded way, the wounds "in palm and side", "The vinegar-heavy sponge", the flowers by the Kedron.
Lines 6 to 8Loosened hair
The speakers answer suffering with tenderness. They will "bend down and loosen our hair over you", like the woman in the Gospels who wiped Christ's feet with her hair. The hair drops perfume and dew, and the last line pairs white with red: "Lilies of death-pale hope, roses of passionate dream".

Themes

Love as suffering

The title's "travail" means painful labour, and the poem treats passion, in the sense of overwhelming love, as a kind of crucifixion. When "an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay", the human heart cannot bear it without pain. Each detail of Christ's Passion becomes a picture of what love inflicts: whipping, thorns, mockery, wounds.

Comfort and beauty

The last three lines turn from pain to care. Loosened hair, perfume, dew, lilies and roses belong to the sensuous world of the 1890s, and here they are offered as healing. The closing flowers hold both moods at once: the lilies are "death-pale", the roses "passionate", so hope and desire stay bound up with death.

Context

Published in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Several poems in that book mix Christian imagery with Yeats's own symbols, and this one sets the Passion of Christ beside the language of love and dreams. The Kedron is the brook outside Jerusalem that Christ crossed on the night of his arrest, which ties the poem closely to the Gospel story.

Form

One eight-line sentence in very long lines of six stresses, rhymed abba cddc ("wide", "clay", "way", "side"; "stream", "you", "dew", "dream"). The long lines and semicolons make the first half a slow procession of suffering; the enclosing rhymes fold each half of the poem shut on itself.