To A Child Dancing In The Wind By Yeats: Poem And Meaning

Yet another wonderful poem from Yeats makes it into the top 100 Irish poems list. This one comes in a number 56.

To a Child Dancing in the Wind is a short but powerful poem. It talks about a child dancing on a shore, oblivious to what is happening around them. The main message seems to be how we can all be so careless and carefree when we are young, but as we age, things like love and life happen.

This is particularly evident when he says, “What need have you to dread”.

Now let’s get to this lovely Irish poem.

To A Child Dancing In The Wind

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind!

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

What did you think of the poem To a Child Dancing in the Wind? Comment below.

To a Child Dancing in the Wind: meaning and analysis

Yeats wrote ‘To a Child Dancing in the Wind’ in 1912 and published it in Responsibilities (1914). The child is Iseult Gonne, the daughter of Maud Gonne, who was a teenager at the time.

What it means

The girl dances by the sea without a care. She has not yet learned about the fool’s triumph, love lost as soon as it is won, or the best labourer dead with all the sheaves still to be bound. The poet, older and full of disappointment, almost envies her innocence and has no wish to spoil it. He tells her to keep dancing, untroubled by the wind and the roaring water.

A companion poem, ‘Two Years Later’, follows it in the collection and is darker in tone. There, the poet warns her that she will be hurt by the world as her mother was.

Key themes

Innocence and experience
Youth and age
Loss and disappointment

More Irish poems

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