The girl would seem to be as much in love as the poet from stanza 2. Here they “tripped lightly along the ledge / Of a deep ravine,” a line whose /l/s make the words run as lightly as they say the lovers did. The danger of running along a ledge is almost overlooked because of the beauty of the line, but dangerous it is. I can only guess at what “passion’s pledge” might have been (l. 6), but lovers sometimes pledge to commit suicide together when facing opposition, and the setting of the deep ravine here seems ominous. The setting now is November, or late in autumn, which implies a progression in this love affair. The tone is both carefree and ominous, but only for the poet. The girl has not been distracted from her own business as she, the “Queen of Hearts” (his heart, that is) is “still making tarts” while he is “not making hay.” This allusion to a deck of cards or Alice in Wonderland works to characterize the girl as powerful over men’s hearts, just as the Queen in a deck of cards can quite easily conquer any of the lower cards, or just as the Queen of Hearts in Alice controlled events at the end of that work. The phrase “not making hay” is also an allusion to the proverb, “Make hay while the sun shines.” It sounds to me like the poet should be doing other work, but has dropped everything to pursue this girl. If you do not make hay while the sun shines, that bodes ill for your crops, or for your economic interests. In the last line of stanza two, the poet confesses that he loves too much. The repetition of “such” here shows that he is involved in trivial pursuit, and he is throwing his happiness away for love; yet it is quite clear that he thinks it is worth it since he predicted it in stanza 1, “I saw the danger” (l. 3).
Stanza 3 seems lighter in tone till the last line where the repetition of “dark hair” reminds me of the danger mentioned in line 3. Here the poet focuses on the things he did to show his love. I wonder if perhaps he wanted this girl to be something that she was not. The “gifts” that he gave her were “of the mind” (l. 9), and I know that girls traditionally like gifts of a more substantial nature. These gifts were apparently poems about her: “poems to say. / With her own name there” (l. 11-12). The poet seems to expect the girl to value these gifts as an artist would. They constitute a “secret sign” (l. 9) that only those in-the-know would recognize. I think that those in-the-know are artists since “who have known the true gods of sound and stone / And word and tint.” (l. 10-11) is metonomy for those who create using sound (musicians), stone (sculptors), “word” (poets and writers) and tint (painters). Clearly for this girl, the gifts go unappreciated. The last line, “her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May” shows that many months have passed now. May is usually a month for lovers, one of blue skies and sunshine. This May is cloudy and dark—like her hair. This simile makes me think that the girl is not happy anymore in this relationship.
Stanza 4 confirms the demise of this relationship. Now the girl is gone. She is only an “old ghost” (l. 13) which would imply that she has been gone a long time now. Although the poet sees her on the street, she “walk[s] / Away…so hurriedly” that the poet realizes how wrong he had been to think that she loved him. His sadness over the failure of this love is keenest in the last two lines of the poem. “I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay” (l. 15) is the poet’s realization that the girl he tried to love was not an artist, not one who could appreciate the “gifts of the mind” that were so important to him. The metaphor “creature made of clay” makes the girl one of the mortals, while he, as a poet, is metaphorically an “angel.” There is no possibility of romance between clay and an angel, and likewise, there was no possibility of romance between the poet and this girl. That he tried, even, was disastrous. The result was the losing of his wings. To a poet, “wings” can be the poetic muse that lifts a poet above the mere masses of mortality. Perhaps Kavanaugh felt that this love affair cost him something as a poet. The “grief” that he predicted for himself at the “dawning of the day” (l. 4) did indeed come. In line 16 that grief is clarified as the angel losing his wings—a grief that seems far more than a fallen leaf for him in the end.
Kavanaugh’s poem is a warning to anyone who thinks they are in love. It seems to me to also be advice in love: that one should love someone who is on the same plane, so to speak. One who loves art needs to find a lover who can appreciate the gifts of art rather than be swept up in the other’s appearance, something like “dark hair,” a flimsy, physical thing that is a deadly snare. At the same time, the sadness of the poem doesn’t feel like the most significant thing about it. I find the beauty of the poem to be predominant and can conclude that even misguided love has its loveliness and is worth having as memory.
