William Butler Yeats

The White Birds

The White Birds - context Summary

Published in 1919

Published in The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), this lyric expresses Yeats’s romantic, escapist longing. The speaker imagines becoming "white birds" with a beloved to escape time, sorrow, and the fleeting flames of passion and beauty. By invoking dew-dabbled flowers and distant Danaan shores, the poem frames transformation as a route to permanence and sanctuary. It emphasizes yearning for flight from human transience rather than detailed narrative action.

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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 fade 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 may not 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 and fret of the flames would we be, Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!

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