The Secret Rose

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1899from The Wind Among the Reeds32 lines

Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,Enfold me in my hour of hours; where thoseWho sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre,Or in the wine vat, dwell beyond the stirAnd tumult of defeated dreams; and deepAmong pale eyelids, heavy with the sleepMen have named beauty. Thy great leaves enfoldThe ancient beards, the helms of ruby and goldOf the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyesSaw the Pierced Hands and Rood of elder riseIn Druid vapour and make the torches dim;Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and himWho met Fand walking among flaming dewBy a grey shore where the wind never blew,And lost the world and Emer for a kiss;And him who drove the gods out of their liss,And till a hundred morns had flowered red,Feasted and wept the barrows of his dead;And the proud dreaming king who flung the crownAnd sorrow away, and calling bard and clownDwelt among wine-stained wanderers in deep woods;And him who sold tillage, and house, and goods,And sought through lands and islands numberless years,Until he found with laughter and with tears,A woman, of so shining loveliness,That men threshed corn at midnight by a tress,A little stolen tress. I, too, awaitThe hour of thy great wind of love and hate.When shall the stars be blown about the sky,Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?

Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.

In brief

Summary

The poet prays to the mystic Rose and waits for the world's end.

The poem is a prayer to the Rose, Yeats's symbol of a secret, eternal beauty. He asks it to "Enfold me in my hour of hours", and then names those it already holds: those who sought it at the Holy Sepulchre or in the wine vat, the Magi, and a line of heroes from Irish legend who gave up the world for a vision or a woman. All are gathered into one long, rolling sentence. Then the speaker turns to himself: "I, too, await" the great wind that will blow the stars about like sparks from a forge. The last lines ask whether that hour has come, and close on the opening words, so the poem ends where it began, still waiting.

Lines to remember

Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,

And lost the world and Emer for a kiss;

Like the sparks blown out of a smithy, and die?

Line by line

Lines 1 to 7The prayer
The poem opens with three epithets heaped on the Rose: "Far off, most secret, and inviolate". He asks to be enfolded among those who sought it in religion or "in the wine vat", and who now rest beyond the "tumult of defeated dreams", deep in the sleep "Men have named beauty".
Lines 8 to 12The Magi and a king
The Rose's "great leaves" hold the "crowned Magi" with their ancient beards and helms "of ruby and gold". Then comes a king who saw Christ's "Pierced Hands" and cross rise in "Druid vapour", and who died in a "vain frenzy". Legend tells this of Conchubar, king of Ulster.
Lines 13 to 15Cuchulain and Fand
Next is the man who "met Fand walking among flaming dew" and "lost the world and Emer for a kiss". This is Cuchulain, the great hero of Ulster, drawn from his wife Emer by the otherworldly Fand. Like everyone in the list, he gives up the real world for an unearthly beauty.
Lines 16 to 18The hero and his dead
Another hero "drove the gods out of their liss", their fairy fort, and then feasted and wept over "the barrows of his dead" until "a hundred morns had flowered red". The poem does not name him, and the chain of "And him who" keeps the list rolling on.
Lines 19 to 21The dreaming king
The "proud dreaming king" flung away his crown and his sorrow to live among "wine-stained wanderers in deep woods", calling "bard and clown" to him. Readers usually take him to be Fergus, the king in Irish legend who gave up his throne for a life of dreams.
Lines 22 to 26The seeker
The last figure sold everything, "tillage, and house, and goods", and searched for "numberless years" until he found a woman of such loveliness that men "threshed corn at midnight by a tress" of her hair. The wonder is told with the plainness of a folk tale.
Lines 27 to 32The poet waits
After "A little stolen tress", the speaker joins the list himself: "I, too, await" the Rose's "great wind of love and hate". He imagines the stars blown about the sky like sparks from a smithy, and dying. The poem ends by asking if the hour has come, and repeats its opening like a spell.

Themes

The Rose as ideal

The Rose here is not a flower but an ideal: a hidden, eternal beauty that draws people out of ordinary life. It is "inviolate", untouched, and it gathers in all who gave everything for vision, whether through faith, wine, war or love. The speaker's wish to be enfolded by it is a wish to join that company, whatever the cost.

Irish legend

Most of the figures come from old Irish stories: Fand and Emer, the hero who fought the gods, the king who fled to the woods. Yeats sets them beside the Magi and the Holy Sepulchre, as if Irish myth and Christian story belonged to one sacred history. Each hero pays heavily, like the one who "lost the world and Emer for a kiss".

The end of the world

The poem looks forward to a final hour when a "great wind of love and hate" will scatter the stars "Like the sparks blown out of a smithy". The end of things is desired, not feared. In Yeats's poems of this time the apocalypse is the moment when the hidden world of the Rose would at last break into this one.

Context

The poem appeared in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). Its title is shared with The Secret Rose, the book of stories Yeats published in April 1897 in a gold-stamped rose binding designed by Althea Gyles. The Rose was the master symbol of his work in the 1890s, drawing together Irish myth, Christian imagery and the occult ideas he was then studying.

Form

Thirty-two lines of iambic pentameter in rhyming couplets ("Rose" and "those", "kiss" and "liss", "sky" and "die"). But the sentences run far past the rhymes, so the couplets are barely felt, and most of the poem is one enormous sentence. The last line repeats the first, with a question mark added, closing the poem like a circle.

Yeats's own note

I find that I have unintentionally changed the old story of Conchubar’s death. He did not see the Crucifixion in a vision, but was told about it. He had been struck by a ball made of the dried brains of an enemy and hurled out of a sling; and this ball had been left in his head and his head had been mended, the Book of Leinster says, with thread of gold because his hair was like gold. Keating, a writer of the time of Elizabeth, says, “In that state did he remain seven years, until the Friday on which Christ was crucified, according to some historians; and when he saw the unusual changes of the creation and the eclipse of the sun and the moon at its full, he asked of Bucrach, a Leinster Druid, who was along with him, what was it that brought that unusual change upon the planets of Heaven and Earth. ‘Jesus Christ, the Son of God,’ said the Druid, ‘who is now being crucified by the Jews.’ ‘That is a pity,’ said Conchubar; ‘were I in his presence I would kill those who were putting him to death.’ And with that he brought out his sword, and rushed at a woody grove which was convenient to him, and began to cut and fell it; and what he said was, that if he were among the Jews, that was the usage he would give them, and from the excessiveness of his fury which seized upon him, the ball started out of his head, and some of the brain came after it, and in that way he died. The wood of Lanshraigh, in Feara Rois, is the name by which that shrubby wood is called.”

I have imagined Cuchulain meeting Fand “walking among flaming dew” because, I think, of something in Mr. Standish O’Grady’s books. The story of their love is one of the most beautiful of our old tales.

I have founded the man “who drove the gods out of their Liss,” or fort, upon something I have read about Caolte after the battle of Gabra, when almost all his companions were killed, driving the gods out of their Liss, either at Osraighe, now Ossory, or at Eas Ruaidh, now Asseroe, a waterfall at Ballyshannon, where Ilbreac, one of the children of the goddess Danu, had a Liss. But maybe I only read it in Mr. Standish O’Grady, who has a fine imagination, for I find no such story in Lady Gregory’s book.

I have founded “the proud dreaming king” upon Fergus, the son of Roigh, the legendary poet of “the quest of the bull of Cuailgne,” as he is in the ancient story of Deirdre, and in modern poems by Ferguson. He married Nessa, and Ferguson makes him tell how she took him “captive in a single look.”

Presently, because of his great love, he gave up his throne to Conchubar, her son by another, and lived out his days feasting, and fighting, and hunting. His promise never to refuse a feast from a certain comrade, and the mischief that came by his promise, and the vengeance he took afterwards, are a principal theme of the poets. I have explained my changing imaginations of him in “Fergus and the Druid,” and in a little song in the second act of The Countess Kathleen, and in Deirdre, but when I wrote my poem here, and in the song in my early book, “Who will drive with Fergus now,” I only knew him in Mr. Standish O’Grady, and my imagination dealt more freely with what I did know than I would approve of today.

I have founded him “who sold tillage, and house, and goods,” upon something in “The Red Pony,” a folk tale in Mr. Larminie’s West Irish Folk Tales. A young man “saw a light before him on the high road. When he came as far, there was an open box on the road, and a light coming up out of it. He took up the box. There was a lock of hair in it. Presently he had to go to become the servant of a king for his living. There were eleven boys. When they were going out into the stable at ten o’clock, each of them took a light but he. He took no candle at all with him. Each of them went into his own stable. When he went into his stable he opened the box. He left it in a hole in the wall. The light was great. It was twice as much as in the other stables.” The king hears of it, and makes him show him the box. The king says, “You must go and bring me the woman to whom the hair belongs.” In the end, the young man, and not the king, marries the woman.