To Some I have Talked with by the Fire

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1895from The Rose16 lines

While I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes,My heart would brim with dreams about the timesWhen we bent down above the fading coals;And talked of the dark folk, who live in soulsOf passionate men, like bats in the dead trees;And of the wayward twilight companies,Who sigh with mingled sorrow and content,Because their blossoming dreams have never bentUnder the fruit of evil and of good:And of the embattled flaming multitudeWho rise, wing above wing, flame above flame,And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name,And with the clashing of their sword blades makeA rapturous music, till the morning break,And the white hush end all, but the loud beatOf their long wings, the flash of their white feet.

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

In brief

Summary

Remembering fireside talk of spirits, faeries and angels.

The poem is a single sentence. While writing "these fitful Danaan rhymes", the poet remembers evenings spent bent over dying coals with friends, talking of the supernatural. They spoke of three kinds of being: "the dark folk" who live in the souls of passionate men like bats in dead trees; the "wayward twilight companies", faery beings who never fell into good and evil; and the "embattled flaming multitude" of angels, rising wing above wing and crying the name of God. The sentence climbs to a vision of heavenly music, ending as morning breaks on the beat of long wings and "the flash of their white feet".

Lines to remember

When we bent down above the fading coals;

Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 3By the fire
While he "wrought out" his poems, his heart would "brim with dreams" of the nights "When we bent down above the fading coals". The dying fire sets the mood: late hours, low light, talk that turns to things unseen.
Lines 4 to 5The dark folk
First they talked of "the dark folk", spirits living in the souls of "passionate men, like bats in the dead trees". The simile makes passion a kind of haunting, something dark roosting inside a person.
Lines 6 to 9The twilight companies
Next came "the wayward twilight companies", the faeries, who "sigh with mingled sorrow and content". Their "blossoming dreams" have never bent "Under the fruit of evil and of good": they stand outside the Fall, neither damned nor saved, and that is why they sigh.
Lines 10 to 16The angels
Last and greatest, "the embattled flaming multitude" of angels rise "wing above wing, flame above flame" and cry "the Ineffable Name". Their clashing swords make "A rapturous music" until morning brings a "white hush", broken only by the beat of their wings and "the flash of their white feet".

Themes

The unseen world

The poem lists the beings Yeats and his friends discussed, rising from the dark to the dazzling: dark spirits in men, faeries of the twilight, angels of fire. The order matters. It moves from passion to half-light to holy flame, so the talk by the fire becomes a climb towards heaven, ending at dawn.

Poetry and friendship

The title thanks the friends who shared these evenings, and the first line calls his poems "fitful Danaan rhymes", modest and Irish. The poet presents his work as growing out of conversation. The fireside, with its "fading coals", is where his imagination was fed.

Context

The poem first appeared in a book in Poems (1895), where it served as a dedication, and it now stands near the end of the lyrics grouped as "The Rose". In the 1890s Yeats was deeply involved in occult study and Irish folklore, and the evenings it recalls, full of talk of faeries and spirits, belong to that world. The "Danaan rhymes" are poems of the Tuatha De Danann, the old gods of Ireland.

Form

Sixteen lines of iambic pentameter in rhyming couplets ("rhymes", "times"; "coals", "souls"), all one sentence. Clauses pile up with "And" and "And of", and the syntax keeps rising, so the reader is carried along like the angels to the single full stop after "white feet".