A wish to sail away opens Yeats’s “The Collar-Bone of a Hare,” and from the first line the speaker is not reporting a real voyage but imagining one. “Would I could cast a sail on the water” places the whole poem in the subjunctive, the grammar of longing. The water is already legendary: “many a king has gone / And many a king’s daughter” across it. The kingdom reached there is made of “comely trees,” lawn, pipes and dancing, and its central lesson is deliberately shocking: “the best thing is / To change my loves while dancing / And pay but a kiss for a kiss.” Love, here, is a dance: balanced, mobile, free of debt and permanent vows. The poem’s core conflict is between this imagined realm and “the old bitter world where they marry in churches,” which the speaker wants to see only from a mocking distance. The central idea is not simply escape, but the power of an alternative vision to reverse the claims of ordinary life: through a small bone, marriage, religion and fidelity are made to look stranger than the dream.
The poem’s two eight-line stanzas move with a lilt and recurrence that imitate the dance they invoke. Rhyme is loose and chiming rather than strict. In the first stanza “water” half-rhymes with “daughter,” “gone” leans toward “lawn,” the repeated “dancing” closes two lines, and “kiss” answers “is” in the final couplet. The second stanza circles around a narrower set of sounds: “water,” “hare,” “stare,” and the repeated “churches,” so the rhyme itself seems to peer through a small opening. Line lengths sway between long, conversational phrases and shorter units like “And many a king’s daughter,” making the poem feel both like speech and like a charm.
The first stanza’s landscape is all sweetness: “the comely trees and the lawn, / The playing upon pipes and the dancing.” Yet the lesson learned there overturns conventional morality. To change loves while dancing is to treat desire as moving music, not as a contract. The phrase “pay but a kiss for a kiss” is perfectly balanced, suggesting an economy without profit or loss. Against it, the second stanza sets an object of strange precision. The speaker would find by the water’s edge “the collar-bone of a hare / Worn thin by the lapping of water,” then “pierce it through with a gimlet and stare.” The gimlet, a small boring tool, is startlingly practical inside a magic wish. The bone becomes a peephole, a charm of second sight. Through it, the “old bitter world” of church weddings would appear far off and laughable. The word “old” matters: it makes marriage and churches feel stale, inherited, resentful, while the dancing world is perpetually present. The water between the two kingdoms is called “untroubled,” as if the act of looking through the bone calms what would otherwise be a bitter division. At the close, the poem returns to the object itself: “the white thin bone of a hare.” “White” and “thin” stress its fragility, yet this small, water-worn thing is imagined as powerful enough to overturn a whole social order.
What makes the poem significant is its enclosed, spell-like doubleness. It does not announce a philosophy; it performs a wish and leaves it in the conditional. The speaker never says he has made the voyage or found the bone. That keeps the laughter over the water suspended between triumph and wistfulness. The poem creates a miniature myth—a place of dancing love, a charmed bone, and a world of churches shrunk by distance—and in doing so reverses the usual moral order: changeability looks wise, fidelity looks absurd. Because that reversal is held inside such simple, musical language, the poem remains unnerving long after its brief spell ends.