To a Young Girl
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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
SummaryAn older man tells a girl he knows her passion from her mother's.
The speaker tells a young girl that he understands, better than anyone, what makes her heart beat so fast. Not even her mother can know it as well as he does, because he once had his heart broken by that mother, when the same "wild thought" set her blood astir and glittered in her eyes. The mother now denies that feeling and has forgotten it. The poem is one long sentence, tender and a little rueful: he sees the mother's youth again in the daughter.
Lines to remember
Who broke my heart for her
And glittered in her eyes.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 5I know
"My dear, my dear" is affectionate, almost fatherly. He claims to know "More than another" what stirs her, more even than "your own mother". The repeated "know" (three times in five lines) presses his claim to a special understanding.
Lines 6 to 11The mother's wild thought
The twist: he knows because he "broke my heart for her", the mother. The same "wild thought" once "Set all her blood astir / And glittered in her eyes". The very short lines about denial and forgetting ("That she denies / And has forgot") are cool and clipped against the heat of the ending.
Themes
Passion across generations
The girl's excitement repeats her mother's, and the speaker has lived through both. What "makes your heart beat so" is the same "wild thought" that once "glittered in her eyes". Youth, the poem suggests, passes on its passion unchanged, even when the older generation "denies / And has forgot" it.
Memory and loss
The speaker is the only one who remembers. The mother has forgotten her own youth, the daughter is too young to see it as a pattern, and he alone holds both pictures. His heartbreak is mentioned in a single plain line, "Who broke my heart for her", and left there.
Context
The poem was added to The Wild Swans at Coole in the enlarged Macmillan edition of 1919. It is usually read as addressed to Iseult Gonne, whose mother was Maud Gonne, the woman Yeats had loved and been refused by since the early 1890s. Yeats had known Iseult since her childhood and proposed to her in 1917. She refused him, and in 1920 she married the novelist Francis Stuart.
Form
A single eleven-line stanza, one sentence, in short lines of two or three beats. The rhymes interweave ("know", "so", "know"; "another", "mother"; "thought", "forgot"; "denies", "eyes"), tying the whole poem into one breath that ends on the bright image of glittering eyes.
