W B Yeats: Three Love Poems

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was Irish, and is one of the great English poets. We center his poetry this month, beginning, appropriately, with love poetry.

In this month of Valentine's Day, with each love poem I read I am suffused with my love for my own 'pearl of great price,' my Jenny. Stay tuned, as next week I will present an original love poem that I wrote for her this Valentine's day, inspired by Yeats' poetry. See if you can find resonances from these three poems in Jenny's poem next week!

To my Jenny: each and every day is magic with you in it! You ARE my heart!

In "The White Birds," an early poem, Yeats wistfully contemplates the eternality of love in a time-bound and limited framework. He wrote it a day after being rejected in his first marriage proposal to his lifelong "unrequited love," Maud Gonne. I love this poem, as it displays how for the poet the particular becomes the universal (Maud loved seagulls).

In "The Lover Tells of the Rose in His Heart," Yeats contrasts the perfection of love with the imperfection and pain in the world, wishing he could remake it to match the beauty and perfection he finds in the Ideal.

"The Cap and Bells" will speak for itself.

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