Arguing with lyrics 1: Never Give All the Heart

I find myself arguing with lyrics that I may have agreed with, at least to a degree, in the past.  Here's the latest, if not most significant, example, in a Yeats poem that the Chieftains arranged on their Tears of Stone CD:

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.

I'm not sure I can count the ways in which I now disagree with this.  For starters, no passionate woman I've ever known would ever be satisfied with receiving less than all the heart.  That isn't to say to give away one's very personhood, but giving any less than all the heart is not love at all.

Yeats must've been deeply hurt, spurned by someone whom he felt was merely playing a game with him.  Yet, there is truth here, too, for some are more interested in being swept off their feet than in being truly loved.  I think of programs like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, and the way all the participants treat love as a game and themselves and one another as a commodity.  I watched this show with Teri the other night, sad to say.  I can't believe we entertain ourselves with people's lives like this.

And yet, I don't agree with Yeats' conclusion either.  Certainly many of us fail to requite the Maker's love, but this He knows: giving all the heart is a gift - to the giver - beyond telling.  In doing so, we never lose.  Loving is its own victory.

Some of the other lyrics I've taken exception to lately are probably more important to understand clearly, because of the emotional investment I've misplaced in them.  More to come . . .