Three Things
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1932. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2028, 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 2028.
It begins: 'O cruel Death, give three things back,'
In brief
SummaryA woman's bone on the shore asks Death for three joys back.
A bone lying on the shore, all that is left of a woman, sings to Death and asks for three things back. The first is nursing a child who found at her breast all the pleasure and rest a child can need. The second is holding a man who found in her body all the pleasure life gave. The third is the morning after she first lay with her rightful man, when she woke to stretch and yawn. Between the verses the bone is seen again, whitened by the waves and dried by the wind.
Lines to remember
A bone wave-whitened and dried in the wind.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6The child
The bone asks cruel Death for three things. The first is motherhood: a child found everything it could want, pleasure or rest, at her full breast. The refrain returns us to the bleached bone, a harsh contrast with the warmth remembered.
Lines 7 to 12The lover
The second of three things women know: a man she held close while her body lived found in her all the pleasure life offers. The bone speaks of sex without shame, as one of life's dear things.
Lines 13 to 18The morning after
The third thing she still thinks of is the morning after she met her rightful man face to face, when she stretched and yawned. The memory is small, physical and content, and it is the one she holds on to last.
Themes
Bodily joy
What the dead woman misses are the body's pleasures: nursing, lovemaking, waking content beside her man. None of the three is spiritual or grand. The poem honours ordinary physical happiness as the heart of a woman's life, the things worth asking Death to return.
Death and memory
The refrain's image of a bleached, wind-dried bone is stark and impersonal, yet the bone still sings and remembers. Death has stripped away the body, but not the longing for what the body knew. The gap between the dry bone and the warm memories gives the poem its ache.
Context
Part of the sequence "Words for Music Perhaps", first gathered in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Cuala Press, 1932) and collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). Like the Crazy Jane poems in the same sequence, it gives a woman's voice to frank feeling about love and the body.
Form
Three six-line stanzas. Each has a double refrain: the second line repeats the bone singing on the shore, and the sixth, longer line repeats the image of the whitened bone. The other lines rhyme in pairs, often by half rhyme. The effect is of a ballad sung over and over by the sea.