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The next love poem on our walk-through is by W.B. Yeats called “The Indian to His Love.†This poem contains probably the most beautiful of any stanza that I’ve seen describing love. The imagery he describes in the first stanza, followed by the way the two characters interact with the scene and each other, makes the heart long to one day find something as magical and wonderful as the poem describes. That’s all I’ll give you for now. We’ll talk more afterwards.
The island dreams under the dawn
And great boughs drop tranquillity;
The peahens dance on a smooth lawn,
A parrot sways upon a tree,
Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.
Here we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:
How we alone of mortals are
Hid under quiet boughs apart,
While our love grows an Indian star,
A meteor of the burning heart,
One with the tide that gleams, the wings that gleam and dart,
The heavy boughs, the burnished dove
That moans and sighs a hundred days:
How when we die our shades will rove,
When eve has hushed the feathered ways,
With vapoury footsole by the water’s drowsy blaze.
WB Yeats
Before we talk about any of the lines, I want to take a moment to deconstruct the format of the poem, because your going to come across it again. Yeats uses a very powerful combination to draw us into his world, longing for what he’s described. In the first stanza, he describes the imagery of nature. If one only read the first stanza, they would have no idea that the poem was a love poem. But by first describing the beauty of the scene, he sets up the poem in a wonderful to describe his two characters and how they interact with it. It is a very powerful formula, and we’ll see it again in subsequent poems. The particular stanza that I want to highlight is the second one.
Here we will moor our lonely ship
And wander ever with woven hands,
Murmuring softly lip to lip,
Along the grass, along the sands,
Murmuring how far away are the unquiet lands:
This is, in my mind, the most beautiful description of love from any poem I’ve read. The duality of feeling, of a lonely ship and woven hands, it elicits a feeling of sanctification, that these two have found something far above the rest of the world, that they are set apart and hidden from the rest of the corruption of mankind. And I love the tender descriptions of murmuring softly lip to lip as they slowly wander their own magical island about how far away the rest of the weary world is.
Part of me thinks this poem would be more powerful if the second two stanzas were left out. In some ways they’re just a reiteration of what has already been said. The third stanza begins:
How we alone of mortals are
Hid under quiet boughs apart,
This feeling has already been explored in the second stanza as the couple “murmurs how far away are the unquiet lands.†But I love how the last stanza begins to talk about the brevity of time and the fatal condition of mankind that all good things must come to an end. It is a powerful wrap up to the story. I hope you enjoyed it. Give the second stanza another read through.
