To a Child dancing in the Wind

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1914from Responsibilities12 lines

Dance there upon the shore;What need have you to careFor wind or water’s roar?And tumble out your hairThat the salt drops have wet;Being young you have not knownThe fool’s triumph, nor yetLove lost as soon as won,Nor the best labourer deadAnd all the sheaves to bind.What need have you to dreadThe monstrous crying of wind?

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

In brief

Summary

An older man watches a young girl dance, untouched by life's losses.

The speaker watches a girl dance on the shore, her hair wet with salt spray, and tells her she has no need to care about the roar of wind and water. Being young, she has not yet known "The fool's triumph", or love lost as soon as it is won, or the death of "the best labourer" with the harvest still to gather. Why should she fear "The monstrous crying of wind"? The poem is gentle towards her innocence but full of the speaker's own disappointments.

Lines to remember

Dance there upon the shore;

Love lost as soon as won,

The monstrous crying of wind?

Line by line

Lines 1 to 5Dance on the shore
"Dance there upon the shore" is half blessing, half command. She need not care "For wind or water's roar", and can "tumble out" her salt-wet hair. The picture is of carefree movement, set against the noise of the elements.
Lines 6 to 10What she has not known
Youth has spared her three griefs: "The fool's triumph", love "lost as soon as won", and "the best labourer dead / And all the sheaves to bind". Each is a loss the speaker has learned; the harvest image suggests good work cut short.
Lines 11 to 12The crying wind
The poem returns to its question: "What need have you to dread / The monstrous crying of wind?" For her the wind is only weather. For him it has become "monstrous", full of the griefs he has just listed.

Themes

Innocence and experience

The girl dances; the speaker watches and remembers. Everything she "has not known" he has: public folly winning, love lost, good men dead. The poem does not wish experience on her. It lets her keep her dance, while the list in lines 6 to 10 quietly shows what lies ahead.

Loss

The three losses cover public and private life. "The fool's triumph" is a defeat in the world; "Love lost as soon as won" is a private grief; "the best labourer dead" leaves "all the sheaves to bind", work unfinished for others to carry. The speaker's sorrows fill the space between the lines.

The wind

The wind begins as part of the child's play, tossing her wet hair, and ends as "The monstrous crying of wind". The same sound means different things to the young and the old. For the dancer it is freedom; for the watcher it is a voice of grief.

Context

The poem was collected in Responsibilities (Cuala Press, 1914). In that first printing "Two Years Later" formed its second part; from 1916 the two poems had separate titles.

The child is usually read as Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne's daughter, whom Yeats had known since her childhood. "The best labourer dead" is sometimes read as a reference to J. M. Synge, who died in 1909, and "The fool's triumph" as the defeats Yeats felt in Dublin's public life.

Form

Twelve short lines of three beats in one stanza, rhyming ABAB ("shore", "care", "roar", "hair"), with one half-rhyme, "known" and "won". Two questions frame the poem, "What need have you to care" and "What need have you to dread", and the list of losses sits between them.