“The Lover Tells Of the Rose In His Heart”

ALL things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

From the Rose, W. B Yeats

London 1982

Source: http:// www.billmurphy.com/Poetry/The_Lover.html

To begin with this paper, I would like to have a look on W. B Yeats’ Biography which I consider interesting in order to understand what the poem is about. In 1865 Yeats was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer who turned a Pre- Raphaelite painter. In 1867 the family followed him to London and settled in Bedford Park. In 1881 they returned to Dublin, where Yeats studied at the Metropolitan School of Art. Reincarnation, communication with the dead, mediums, supernatural systems and Oriental mysticism fascinated Yeats through his life. In 1887 Yeats formed The Dublin Lodge of the Hermetic Society. As a writer Yeats made his debut in 1885, when he published his first poems in The Dublin University Review. In 1887 the family returned to Bedford Park, and Yeats devoted himself to writing. In 1889 Yeats met his great love, Maud Gonne (1866 – 1953), an actress and Irish revolutionary who became a major landmark in his life and imagination. However she married in 1903 Major John MacBride, (Yeats, Biography and works) and I think this episode it would be inspired by the poem or even the fact that the author felt homesick for his country because in the poem Yeats is remembering “all things” that characterize and make his country local, as it is stated in the first stanza; “The cry of a child, the creak of a lumbering cart”, 2^nd verse.

In 1896 Yeats returned to live permanently in his home country. So I think that the Poem was written for the reasons I said before because Yeats wrote it in 1892 and he was still in Bedford Park He reformed the Irish Literary Society, and the National Literary Society in Dublin, which aimed to promote the New Irish Library. In 1923, Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1932 Yeats founded the Irish Academy of Letters and in 1933 he was briefly involved with the fascist Blue Shirts in Dublin. Finally in 1939 Yeats died in Menton, France. (Yeats, Biography and works)

The poem is separated into two stanzas of four verses each, that’s to say, two quatrains whose rhyme is A-B-A-B / A-B-A-B. We can find visual rhyme old-mould-told-gold; cart-heart-apart-heart. The poem has musicality to give speed when reading.

According to the title of the poem we realize that, as I have said before, the poem is about a person who the author really loves or about the yearning Yeats feels because of the fact of not being in his home town, in Dublin, and all what Yeats sees in Bedford (London), remembers him of Ireland. The author emphasizes his feelings making reference to the poem’s title at the end of both quatrains adding “Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart”, 4^th verse and “For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart”, 8^th verse.

Yeats with the 2^nd verse is remembering for example daily life in Ireland, “The cry of a child… the creak…”.The author also remembers the frozen winters because as we know England and Ireland have a cold weather and it is always raining and snowing.

W. B. Yeats makes with the words “All things” in verse one, an enumeration of those concrete things that lead him to feel sad and at the same time happy because “The cry of a child, the creak of a lumbering cart” in verse two; “the wintry mould” in verse three; “the green knoll apart” in 6^th verse; “the earth, the sky and the water” in 7^th verse, carry him to feel “your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart” 4^th and 8^th verses. I mean, with the words “your image” Yeats is referring to his country, its lovely Ireland; the author imagines and thinks about the popular sights, the green landscapes of the Irish country and it is as if he were in love with his home country.

Moreover we can also think that Yeats is at the same time comparing his country’s beauty with the good-looking of his beloved woman because as the title says , the poem is about “a lover”, but this word is a wide term which covers different senses; the first one can be the love he feels about his fatherland, a love of country, and the other one, can be the love Yeats feels about the person he loves.

As I have said before, the author feels apart from the Irish Culture and feels “hunger” as the 6^th verse states and he needs “to build” “all the things” mentioned above to feel better with himself. Finally Yeats is comparing the landscape and his dreams with a “casket of gold” in the 7^th verse to say that all his feelings have got sentimental value. Gold itself has also a value from a materialistic point of view.

To conclude this essay, I think what Yeats wants with this poem is to be loyal to his country and to commemorate it even being in another country and to make public through writing and, although he is not there, Yeats probably wrote “The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart” in praise of Ireland, his fatherland.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

· William Butler Yeats – Biography and Works, Copyright © 2000 - 2006 Jalic LLC.

http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/ 04.05.06

· W .B. Yeats – Poetry. The lover Tells of the Rose in his Heart, Bill Murphy, Copyright © 2000 – 2006.

http://www.billmurphy.com/Poetry/The_Lover.html 04.05.06

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