Two Songs Rewritten For The Tunes Sake - Analysis

Love as hunger, art as the thin meal

Both songs are spoken by men who can’t get what they want, and who feel their own art turning into a kind of self-mockery. In Part I, the speaker’s desire for Paistin Finn has reduced him to skin and bone, as if love were literal starvation. In Part II, the speaker envies even an old beggar because at least the beggar’s blindness would protect him from seeing my lady / Go gallivanting by. Across the two pieces, Yeats makes a sharp claim: to be left outside love is to be trapped with the sounds you can make—whistles, refrains, rhymes—instead of any real reply.

The refrain that tries to become a fist

Part I keeps pivoting between helplessness and threat. The speaker can only whistle alone and alone, yet he repeats, like a vow, To-morrow night I will break down the door. That line sounds bold, but it’s also suspiciously postponed: tomorrow, not tonight. The refrain Oro, oro! works like a chant meant to pump courage into him, as if rhythm could substitute for power. The tension is plain: he wants to act, but what he actually does is repeat himself, turning aggression into a chorus.

Alone with the body: shins, rain, bushes

The loneliness in Part I isn’t abstract; it’s physical and slightly ridiculous. He asks, What is the good of a man who is Alone and alone, with a speckled shin?—an oddly specific detail that makes him feel exposed, shabby, maybe even comical in his own eyes. His fantasy of satisfaction is equally concrete: drinking with my love on my knee / Between two barrels at the inn, warmth and public belonging replacing his current situation, Between two bushes under the rain. But even at his most determined—I whistled and whistled and whistled—the sound does nothing. The repeated whistling is effort without access, desire turned into a noise that dies in the weather.

The cruel wish to be blind

Part II shifts the mood from rowdy lament to a colder, more inward bitterness. The speaker’s wish is not to win the lady back but to stop seeing: Rolling a blind pearl eye is a grotesque image, pretty and dead at once. He imagines the beggar as dreary, dreepy, friendless, cursed with a thieving rascally cur, and still decides that misery would be preferable if it came with not knowing what she does. Here the contradiction sharpens: he can tolerate deprivation, even squalor, but not the clear evidence of her independence.

Rhymer versus beggar: the shame of making songs

The final turn is the most self-condemning: he would be anything else but a rhymer, a man with nothing in his head / But rhymes for a beautiful lady, rhyming alone in his bed. This echoes Part I’s whistle alone and alone: both speakers are stuck producing sound in solitude. The art that should dignify feeling becomes proof of uselessness—private, repetitive, and a little humiliating. Taken together, the songs suggest that the deepest pain isn’t simply rejection; it’s the sense that your most intimate gift—your tune, your rhyme—can’t open a door, can’t call her down, can’t even keep you from watching her go.

A sharper question the poems won’t answer

When the speaker promises to break down the door, is he threatening the beloved, or threatening the barrier of his own passivity? And when he’d rather be blind than a poet, is that humility—or a refusal to face what the poems keep showing: that she has a life beyond his song?