To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire
To Some I Have Talked with by the Fire - meaning Summary
Conversations Around Fading Coals
The poem recollects intimate fireside conversations in which the speaker and companions imagine inner beings and assemblies that personify passion, moral ambiguity, and spiritual longing. Through clustered, mythic images—dark folk, twilight companies, and an embattled flaming multitude—Yeats maps the inner life as both troubled and exalted. The poem moves between nostalgia for those talks and a visionary sense of minds rising together toward ecstatic, ineffable revelation.
Read Complete AnalysesWhile I wrought out these fitful Danaan rhymes, My heart would brim with dreams about the times When we bent down above the fading coals And talked of the dark folk who live in souls Of passionate men, like bats in the dead trees; And of the wayward twilight companies Who sigh with mingled sorrow and content, Because their blossoming dreams have never bent Under the fruit of evil and of good: And of the embattled flaming multitude Who rise, wing above wing, flame above flame, And, like a storm, cry the Ineffable Name, And with the clashing of their sword-blades make A rapturous music, till the morning break And the white hush end all but the loud beat Of their long wings, the flash of their white feet.
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