When You Are Sad

W. B. Yeatsfrom Early and uncollected poems12 lines

When you are sad,The mother of the stars weeps too,And all her starlight is with sorrow mad,And tears of fire fall gently in the dew.

When you are sad,The mother of the wind mourns too,And her old wind that no mirth ever had,Wanders and wails before my heart most true

When you are sad,The mother of the wave sighs too,And her dim wave bids man be no more glad,And then the whole world’s trouble weeps with you.

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

In brief

Summary

A lover imagines the whole world weeping when his beloved is sad.

Each of the three short stanzas begins "When you are sad". The speaker tells the woman he loves that her sadness spreads through the universe. The mother of the stars weeps, and her starlight falls as "tears of fire" in the dew. The mother of the wind mourns, and her old, joyless wind wails before his heart. The mother of the wave sighs, and her dim wave tells mankind to be glad no more, until "the whole world's trouble weeps with you". It is a love poem of pure sympathy, in which one person's sorrow becomes the sorrow of everything.

Lines to remember

And tears of fire fall gently in the dew.

And then the whole world's trouble weeps with you.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 4The stars
When she is sad, "The mother of the stars weeps too". Her starlight is "with sorrow mad", and "tears of fire fall gently in the dew": starlight glinting in the dewdrops becomes falling tears, fierce and soft at once.
Lines 5 to 8The wind
The second stanza repeats the pattern with the wind. Its mother mourns, and her "old wind that no mirth ever had" wanders and wails before the speaker's heart. Here the lover places himself in the scene: the grieving world passes through him.
Lines 9 to 12The wave
The mother of the wave sighs, and her "dim wave" bids man be "no more glad". The last line gathers stars, wind and sea into one: "the whole world's trouble weeps with you". Her sadness now holds all the sorrow there is.

Themes

Love as sympathy

The lover does not try to cheer the woman up. Instead he tells her that her sadness is shared by stars, wind and sea, and, quietly, by "my heart most true". His devotion shows itself as fellow feeling: when she is sad, nothing in the world, himself included, can be glad.

Nature and feeling

Each stanza gives a part of nature a "mother", a spirit who feels for the woman. Stars, wind and wave are the great elements of the early Yeats landscape, and here they behave like mourners. The poem imagines a universe that answers human feeling, swelling at the end into "the whole world's trouble".

Context

This is one of the early poems Yeats later dropped from his collections. Its music of repetition, and its picture of stars, wind and sea grieving along with a loved woman, belong to the same world as "The Pity of Love" and "When You Are Old". The woman is not named.

Form

Three quatrains, each opening with the same short line, "When you are sad", followed by longer lines. All three stanzas use the same two rhyme sounds ("sad", "mad"; "too", "dew"), so the poem rings like a chant or litany, with stars, wind and wave each taking their turn.