His Bargain - Analysis

From cosmic machinery to a pub-room shrug

The poem’s central move is to drag a grand philosophical image down to the level of ordinary, fickle human desire—and then, unexpectedly, to claim a private vow that outlasts both. It opens with a scoffing question: Who talks of Plato’s spindle? Plato’s spindle is a figure for the ordered turning of the universe, the hidden mechanism behind fate and time. Yeats’s speaker immediately undercuts it by asking What set it whirling round? The tone is brisk, slightly contemptuous: don’t dazzle me with metaphysics if you can’t say what started it. That impatience sets up the poem’s bigger point: systems that pretend to explain everything (eternity, time, destiny) may be less persuasive than the stubborn fact of a promise.

Even the cosmic terms get treated like threadbare clothing. Eternity may dwindle suggests something supposedly infinite shrinking to a manageable, even shabby, size. Time is unwound makes time not a forward surge but a spool being pulled apart—less heroic than domestic, like yarn slipping off a bobbin.

Dan and Jerry Lout: fickleness as a counter-myth

Against Plato’s high seriousness Yeats drops in Dan and Jerry Lout, names that sound deliberately common, even comic. They Change their loves about—a blunt phrase that refuses romantic glamour. This is a key tension: the poem sets the scale of eternity beside the small, recurring human habit of switching attachments. In that contrast, philosophical grandeur looks oddly irrelevant. Whatever the universe is doing, these two keep trading partners. The speaker’s skepticism toward cosmic explanation is matched by skepticism toward human constancy—most people, the poem implies, are not built to keep a single line unbroken.

But the poem doesn’t stop at cynicism. The presence of Dan and Jerry is not only mockery; it’s pressure. Their changeability forces the speaker to define what kind of attachment could resist that churn.

The turn: a thread that existed before choice

The decisive turn arrives with However they may take it. The speaker stops talking about Plato and the louts and begins to testify. He claims that Before the thread began he made something he may not break. This is where the poem shifts from public debate to private necessity. The tone firms into a kind of calm fatalism: not I will not break it, but I may not—as if the vow has the force of law.

That phrasing makes the poem’s central contradiction sharp: the speaker insists on agency (I made) and inevitability (may not break it) at the same time. The vow is chosen, yet once chosen it behaves like fate. In a poem that began by questioning what makes the spindle turn, the speaker ends up describing a human-made mechanism that turns on its own, binding him until the last thread has run.

A bargain with hair: intimacy replacing cosmology

The strangest, most intimate image is the closing one: A bargain with that hair and all the windings there. Hair is physical, close to the body, easily handled—something you can literally wind around a finger. By making the bargain with hair rather than with a person named outright, the poem concentrates desire into a talisman. It also echoes the earlier thread imagery: hair can be spun, braided, coiled; it is a natural thread. The windings suggest both the curls of hair and the twistings of a shared history—complications, returns, loops.

So the poem quietly replaces Plato’s grand spindle with a smaller spindle: the beloved’s hair, and the speaker’s promise bound up in it. The universe’s turning becomes something you can hold. The cost is clear, too: if time is unwound and hair is windings, then love here is not a clean line but a tightening coil—beautiful, binding, potentially claustrophobic.

The uncomfortable implication: is the beloved also the trap?

If the speaker’s bargain is made with that hair, not directly with the beloved’s will, the poem hints at a disturbing possibility: he is pledged less to a person than to an image, a token, a spell. That would explain the hard language of necessity—may not break it—as if he has bound himself to a charm that keeps tightening even when the living relationship changes. In that light, Dan and Jerry’s fickleness isn’t merely vulgar; it’s a warning about what happens when love stays fluid versus when it becomes a knot.

What lasts when time is a spool

By the end, Yeats has made a compact argument without preaching it: metaphysical explanations may fail to say what set anything in motion, and ordinary people may swap loves as easily as coats, but a vow can still function like destiny. The poem’s final force comes from its refusal to romanticize that fact. The bargain is not presented as pure bliss; it is a binding thread that will hold until the last thread has run, whether that feels like devotion, compulsion, or both.