Two Years Later

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1914from Responsibilities12 lines

Has no one said those daringKind eyes should be more learn’d?Or warned you how despairingThe moths are when they are burned,I could have warned you, but you are young,So we speak a different tongue.

O you will take whatever’s offeredAnd dream that all the world’s a friend,Suffer as your mother suffered,Be as broken in the end.But I am old and you are young,And I speak a barbarous tongue.

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 warns a young woman, knowing she will not listen.

Two years on from the child dancing in the wind, the speaker asks whether no one has warned the young woman that her "daring / Kind eyes" should be wiser, and that moths despair when they are burned. He could have warned her himself, but she is young, and they "speak a different tongue". She will take whatever life offers, trust the whole world, and "Suffer as your mother suffered". The poem ends on his own position: he is old, and to her he speaks "a barbarous tongue".

Lines to remember

Suffer as your mother suffered,

But I am old and you are young,

And I speak a barbarous tongue.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 6The unheard warning
Her eyes are "daring" and "Kind", open to the world. The moth drawn to the flame is the warning he would give. But "you are young, / So we speak a different tongue": the young cannot hear the language of experience.
Lines 7 to 12As your mother suffered
He predicts her life: she will "take whatever's offered", "dream that all the world's a friend", and "Be as broken in the end" as her mother. The closing couplet changes the refrain: his speech is now "barbarous", foreign and rough to her ears.

Themes

Youth and age

The two stanzas end on nearly the same couplet: "you are young, / So we speak a different tongue" and "But I am old and you are young, / And I speak a barbarous tongue". The gap between the generations is a gap of language. His advice will sound to her like a foreign, uncouth speech.

Inherited suffering

"Suffer as your mother suffered, / Be as broken in the end" is the poem's hardest prophecy. The young woman's trust, dreaming "all the world's a friend", is the very thing that will hurt her. The moth image makes the danger clear: the brightness that draws her is the thing that burns.

Context

In Responsibilities (Cuala Press, 1914) this poem was printed as the second part of "To a Child dancing in the Wind"; from 1916 it had its own title. The title looks back to that poem: the child is now a young woman.

The poems are usually read as addressed to Iseult Gonne, Maud Gonne's daughter, whom Yeats knew from her childhood and to whom he proposed in 1917. If so, the mother whose suffering she will repeat is Maud Gonne, whose own hopes in love and politics had brought her much grief.

Form

Two six-line stanzas, each rhyming ABABCC ("daring", "learn'd", "despairing", "burned", then "young" and "tongue"). The closing couplets use the same rhyme words, so the second stanza answers the first with a harsher version of the same idea. The lines are short and plain, like speech.