Littérature anglophone| “Never Give all the Heart” by W.B Yeats (1865-1939)
Irish Literature | Analysis of the poem by Yeats.
The poem
Never give all the Heart
By William Butler Yeats
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
Introduction
Throughout the poem, Yeats’s message is clear: don’t give your whole heart to someone. The poem can be read as a warning to never love someone wholeheartedly. Literally, the poem deals with a man blinded by love who has given all his heart to a woman who broke it.
Yeats’s own personal life is clearly the inspiration for these lines. At the time that Yeats published his poems, Maud Gonne was the major focus of his life. He was deeply in love with her and proposed to her four times. She rejected him all four times and married someone else. It can easily be thought that this poem might have sprung from that terrible heartbreak that left him with a cracked and bruised heart forever.
Yeats’s own personal life is clearly the inspiration for these lines. At the time that Yeats published his poems, Maud Gonne was the major focus of his life. He was deeply in love with her and proposed to her four times. She rejected him all four times and married someone else. It can easily be thought that this poem might have sprung from that terrible heartbreak that left him with a cracked and bruised heart forever.