Two Songs Rewritten for the Tune's Sake
Two Songs Rewritten for the Tune's Sake - meaning Summary
Longing and Comic Frustration
Yeats's 'Two Songs Rewritten For The Tune's Sake' presents two short ballad-like pieces of comic longing. The speaker expresses obsessive desire for Paistin Finn, reduced to hunger, night vigils and thwarted whistling, promising forceful action. The second poem imagines the speaker as a pitiable blind beggar or lonely rhyming fool, emphasizing humiliation and powerlessness before the beloved. Both use repetition and plain speech to render desire as embarrassingly earnest and slightly absurd.
Read Complete AnalysesI My Paistin Finn is my sole desire, And I am shrunken to skin and bone, For all my heart has had for its hire Is what I can whistle alone and alone. Oro, oro! Tomorrow night I will break down the door. What is the good of a man and he Alone and alone, with a speckled shin? I would that I drank with my love on my knee Between two barrels at the inn. Oro, oro! To-morrow night I will break down the door. Alone and alone nine nights I lay Between two bushes under the rain; I thought to have whistled her down that I whistled and whistled and whistled in vain. Oro, oro! To-morrow night I will break down the door. From The Pot of Broth Tune: Paistin Finn II I would that I were an old beggar Rolling a blind pearl eye, For he cannot see my lady Go gallivanting by; A dreary, dreepy beggar Without a friend on the earth But a thieving rascally cur - O a beggar blind from his birth; Or anything else but a rhymer Without a thing in his head But rhymes for a beautiful lady, He rhyming alone in his bed. From The Player Queen
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