The White Birds


Poem by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), 1892.
Appears in his publication "The Rose", 1893, a collection of 22 poems.

Written for "his great unrequited love”, Maude Gonne.

Yeats composed this poem in the days that followed his first of four unsuccessful proposals to Ms Gonne in 1892 during a walk along the cliffs of Howth, a seaside village near Dublin.

Ms Gonne declared her love of seagulls above all other birds to Yeats during their will-they-won’t-they friendship, and so he penned this poem for her.

The "Danaan Shore" refers to Tír na nÓg (Land of the young), an imaginary land where mortals live as long as do fairies. Danu was the queen of the fairies that inhabited this land.

Yeats interpreted Gonne's wish to become a seagull as a wish for freedom from sorrow and time. He wishes, in vain, that they could escape the political and social circumstances that keep them apart, whether on an isolated island, in a mythic environment, or by becoming white birds, forever entwined with his ‘beloved’ Maude, bobbing up and down on the sea, enjoying the gentle undulations of life together.



I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea:        
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can pass by and flee;        
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,        
Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that never may die.        

A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose,        
Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes,        
Or the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew:        
For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam—I and you.        

I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,        
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more:        
Soon far from the rose and the lily, the fret of the flames, would we be,        
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea.        



Recorded by Danish artist Susie Nielsen
Album: Pigens Morgen (2006)


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