William Butler Yeats

The Pity of Love

The Pity of Love - fact Summary

In the Rose Collection

This short lyric by W.B. Yeats is included in his collection The Rose. It presents a compact meditation on love’s vulnerability: a speaker lists ordinary and natural threats—people trading, traveling clouds, cold winds, and a hazel grove—each image converging to "threaten the head that I love." The poem’s spare diction and cumulative images frame pity as a quiet, pervasive sorrow surrounding affection.

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A pity beyond all telling Is hid in the heart of love: The folk who are buying and selling, The clouds on their journey above, The cold wet winds ever blowing, And the shadowy hazel grove Where mouse-grey waters are flowing, Threaten the head that I love.

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