To Dorothy Wellesley
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: Stretch towards the moonless midnight of the trees
In brief
SummaryYeats urges a poet friend to wait at night for the Furies.
Addressed to the poet Dorothy Wellesley at her house in Sussex. Yeats tells her to reach out towards the dark trees at midnight as if they were soft old furniture she could touch and draw closer. Filled with the sensuous silence of the night, she should climb to her room of books and wait, with no book on her knee and only her sleeping Great Dane for company. What climbs the stair to her, if she is worth his hope, will not be contentment or a clear conscience, but the Proud Furies, each holding a torch high.
Lines to remember
The Proud Furies each with her torch on high.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 7Reaching for the trees
She is to stretch her hand towards the moonless trees as if they were old upholstery, delightful to touch, and tighten her grip to draw them close. Filled with the night's sensuous silence, she hears no dogs: since the land to the horizon has been bought, strange dogs are quiet.
Lines 8 to 11Waiting in the book-room
She should climb to her chamber of books and wait, but not read. No one is there except a Great Dane, too deep in sleep to bay the moon. Then the poem asks who or what is coming up the stair.
Lines 12 to 16The Proud Furies
Not what ordinary women think of, if she is worth his hope: not contentment, not a satisfied conscience, but the great family that some famous ancient authors have misrepresented. The Proud Furies arrive, each with a torch held high, a terrifying and splendid visitation.
Themes
Inspiration
The poem is a set of instructions for receiving inspiration: darkness, silence, solitude, no books. What comes is not comfort but the Furies. For Yeats, real poetry is fed by passion and terror, and he honours his friend by hoping she is strong enough to receive such guests.
Night and the senses
The opening is intensely physical. The trees become upholstery to stroke, and the silence is "most sensuous". The poet must first be filled by the dark world through the body before the visionary moment on the stair. Touch leads to vision.
Context
First published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938). Yeats met the poet Dorothy Wellesley in 1935, included her generously in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and edited the 1937 Broadsides with her. He often stayed at her house, Penns in the Rocks in Sussex, in his last years, and the poem is set there.
The Furies are the avenging goddesses of Greek tragedy. In Aeschylus's Oresteia they are tamed at last and renamed the Kindly Ones; Yeats's phrase about ancient authors who "misrepresent" them suggests he preferred them untamed, as the fierce powers behind great art.
Form
Sixteen lines of five-beat verse rhyming ABAB in four sets, with half rhymes ("full" and "still", "moon" and "on"). The lines run on without stanza breaks, and the sentences spill across line endings, so the rhymes are almost hidden. The one question in line 11 turns the poem towards its dramatic close.
