Never Give All the Heart

by William Butler Yeats

Sabina Velilyaeva 171

 Short biography
William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish
poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-
century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to
found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a
Senator of the Irish Free State. Yeats is noteworthy as a master of
traditional poetic forms while recognized as one of the greatest exponents
of modernist verse. 
 Never Give All the Heart
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
 Перевод Лакира Келди
Нельзя любви всё сердце отдавать:
Едва ль надежда будет удержать
Вниманье женщин, коль уверены они,
Что чувство крепко. Им утомлены,
Всё холодней становятся в ответ;
И вот уж очарованности нет —
Так мимолётно наслажденья забытьё.
О, сердце полностью не отдавай своё,
Не верь им, шёпоту их губ: порой
Не страстью он рождаем, а игрой.
В игре той не соперник ты совсем —
Любовью ослеплён, и глух, и нем.
И знает, что за цену то сулит,
Кто, ставкой сделав сердце, был разбит.
 Thematic formation
This poem has a theme of unrequited love, blame, vulnerability.
Throughout Never Give All The Heart, Yeats’ message is clear: don’t give your
whole heart to someone. Yeats’ own personal life is a little tragic, and is clearly
the inspiration for this piece. He proposed to Maud Gonne four times, who
rejected him all four of these times, and then proceeded to marry someone else.
The poem speaks about a man blinded by love, who has given his whole heart to
a woman just to have it broken. 

Maud Gonne
 Structure
Never Give All The Heart by William Butler Yeats is written in
a sonnet form. The sonnet form measures 14 lines. The rhyme scheme
in this sonnet form is AABBCCDDEEFFGG, with all lines rhyming
in couplets. This creates a certain harmony to the lines of the poem.
 Stylistic devices
Epithets: brief, dreamy, kind delight;
Metaphor: lips can say, he gave all his heart and lost;
Synecdoche: all smooth lips;
Polysyndeton: deaf and dumb and blind;
Rhetorical question : And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love? ;
Emphatic construction: He that made this knows all the cost;
Ellipsis: Have given their hearts up to the play.
The poem has a romantic, but sad atmosphere. The lyric hero is
frustrated about his unrequited love. He knows that giving up one’s
heart to someone who does not want to accept it brings pain and
loss. He has already given his heart up to the game and lost
miserably. It is obvious to say that love is a gamble, which he is not
lucky to win.