Yeats's "Words" comes from his 1910 collection, The Green Helmet and Other Poems, which marks a departure from his earlier works. At the time of writing, Yeats's great love, Maude Gonne, had recently married someone else, and Yeats was extremely disconsolate over this, a fact which is made clear through many of the poems in the book.

In "Words," Yeats is lamenting the fact that his "darling"—as he realized some time earlier—cannot understand why he does what he does. She does not understand his poetry, or why he spends so much time working on it. The reference to the "bitter land" in which he is writing underlines the fact that both Gonne and Yeats were Irish nationalists, but while Yeats sees his poetry as an act of protectionism and revolution for the Irish cause, Gonne does not see it in the same way. Yeats says that the best work he has done has been in the pursuit of helping his darling to understand the purpose and meaning of his work; it ultimately makes him slightly less "weary" to know that he has tried as hard as he possibly could.

Ultimately, however, Yeats wonders what would have happened—what would have "shaken from the sieve"—if his beloved actually had come to understand the purpose and meaning of his work. He speculates that, possibly, if she had understood him from the beginning, he would not have been so focused on his words at all, but would have been "content to live." He has fixated on the idea of helping her understand his writing; it has become a goal in and of itself. He now wonders what would have happened—where his fixation would have lain—if she had never struggled to comprehend his writing.