Supernatural Songs
Read 'Supernatural Songs' by 'William Butler Yeats' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
I. Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn
Because you have found me in the pitch-dark night
With open book you ask me what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head
Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,
All know their tale, all know what leaf and twig,
What juncture of the apple and the yew,
Surmount their bones; but speak what none have heard.
The miracle that gave them such a death
Transfigured to pure substance what had once
Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
There is no touching here, nor touching there,
Nor straining joy, but whole is joined to whole;
For the intercourse of angels is a light
Where for its moment both seem lost, consumed.
Here in the pitch-dark atmosphere above
The trembling of the apple and the yew,
Here on the anniversary of their death,
The anniversary of their first embrace,
Those lovers, purified by tragedy,
Hurry into each other's arms; these eyes,
By water, herb and solitary prayer
Made aquiline, are open to that light.
Though somewhat broken by the leaves, that light
Lies in a circle on the grass; therein
I turn the pages of my holy book.
II. Ribh denounces Patrick
An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man -
Recall that masculine Trinity. Man, woman, child
(daughter or son),
That's how all natural or supernatural stories run.
Natural and supernatural with the self-same ring are wed.
As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead begets
Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind;
When the conflagration of their passion sinks, damped by the
body or the mind,
That juggling nature mounts, her coil in their embraces
twined.
The mirror-scaled serpent is multiplicity,
But all that run in couples, on earth, in flood or air, share God that is but three,
And could beget or bear themselves could they but love as He.
III. Ribh in Ecstasy
What matter that you understood no word!
Doubtless I spoke or sang what I had heard
In broken sentences. My soul had found
All happiness in its own cause or ground.
Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot
Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot
Those amorous cries that out of quiet come
And must the common round of day resume.
IV. There
There all the barrel-hoops are knit,
There all the serpent-tails are bit,
There all the gyres converge in one,
There all the planets drop in the Sun.
V. Ribh considers Christian Love insufficient
Why should I seek for love or study it?
It is of God and passes human wit.
I study hatred with great diligence,
For that's a passion in my own control,
A sort of besom that can clear the soul
Of everything that is not mind or sense.
Why do I hate man, woman or event?
That is a light my jealous soul has sent.
From terror and deception freed it can
Discover impurities, can show at last
How soul may walk when all such things are past,
How soul could walk before such things began.
Then my delivered soul herself shall learn
A darker knowledge and in hatred turn
From every thought of God mankind has had.
Thought is a garment and the soul's a bride
That cannot in that trash and tinsel hide:
Hatred of God may bring the soul to God.
At stroke of midnight soul cannot endure
A bodily or mental furniture.
What can she take until her Master give!
Where can she look until He make the show!
What can she know until He bid her know!
How can she live till in her blood He live!
VI. He and She
As the moon sidles up
Must she sidle up,
As trips the scared moon
Away must she trip:
'His light had struck me blind
Dared I stop".
She sings as the moon sings:
'I am I, am I;
The greater grows my light
The further that I fly.'
All creation shivers
With that sweet cry.
VII. What Magic Drum?
He holds him from desire, all but stops his breathing lest
primordial Motherhood forsake his limbs, the child no longer
rest,
Drinking joy as it were milk upon his breast.
Through light-obliterating garden foliage what magic drum?
Down limb and breast or down that glimmering belly move
his mouth and sinewy tongue.
What from the forest came? What beast has licked its young?
VIII. Whence had they come?
Eternity is passion, girl or boy
Cry at the onset of their sexual joy
'For ever and for ever'; then awake
Ignorant what Dramatis personae spake;
A passion-driven exultant man sings out
Sentences that he has never thought;
The Flagellant lashes those submissive loins
Ignorant what that dramatist enjoins,
What master made the lash. Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
What sacred drama through her body heaved
When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?
IX. The Four Ages of Man
He with body waged a fight,
But body won; it walks upright.
Then he struggled with the heart;
Innocence and peace depart.
Then he struggled with the mind;
His proud heart he left behind.
Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
X. Conjunctions
If Jupiter and Saturn meet,
What a cop of mummy wheat!
The sword's a cross; thereon He died:
On breast of Mars the goddess sighed.
XI. A Needle's Eye
All the stream that's roaring by
Came out of a needle's eye;
Things unborn, things that are gone,
From needle's eye still goad it on.
XII. Meru
Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a mle, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day brings round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.
Supernatural Songs Summary and Analysis
Supernatural Songs moves like a sequence of visionary fragments rather than a single continuous lyric, and that broken form is part of its meaning. Across the sections, Yeats creates the voice of Ribh, a figure who speaks from holiness, ecstasy, and provocation at once. Ribh meditates beside the tomb of Baile and Aillinn, denounces Christian doctrine in favor of mystical generation, praises a state beyond ordinary desire, and then turns to compact aphorisms about cycles, oppositions, and the destruction of civilization. The result is a poem less interested in narrative than in revelation: each section offers a different angle on desire, spiritual union, and the collapse of ordinary categories.
The central tension is between bodily life and transcendence. Ribh repeatedly treats passion, sex, and even hatred as routes toward some larger reality, while also suggesting that human thought and civilization are unstable coverings over a more elemental truth. Yeats makes the poem feel both exalted and unsettling: the speakers seek purification, union, and cosmic pattern, yet their language also carries strain, irony, and menace. The poem's larger movement is toward a realm where opposites meet, but it never allows that hope to become simple or serene.
Tone in Supernatural Songs
Yeats's tone is prophetic, combative, and visionary, as if he were staging a series of revelations from a speaker who trusts paradox more than argument. At moments the language feels devotional or ecstatic, yet it also turns sardonic and severe, especially when Ribh attacks conventional religion or civilization. The mood for the reader is turbulent and heightened: the poem feels lit by flashes of insight, but that light falls over darkness, spiritual conflict, and the uneasy sense that every truth here is partial and hard-won.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in Supernatural Songs
- Mystical union - The poem repeatedly imagines a state in which separate beings, forces, or meanings are joined into one larger reality, whether in the lovers at Baile and Aillinn, the divine pairings of later sections, or the final convergence of all things.
- Body and spirit - Yeats treats physical desire not as the enemy of spiritual life but as one of the places where hidden truth can appear, even as the poem keeps questioning whether bodily experience can truly lead beyond itself.
- Cycles and recurrence - Time in the poem is circular rather than linear: anniversaries, repeating patterns, and recurring cosmic motions suggest that history and passion return in altered forms.
- Opposition and reconciliation - Many sections build from contrast, such as love and hatred, man and woman, nature and abstraction, or civilization and wilderness, but the poem continually seeks a deeper order that can absorb these opposites.
- Critique of religion and doctrine - Ribh's speeches challenge inherited Christian thinking, replacing it with a more esoteric and elemental vision of divine generation and spiritual transformation.
- Impermanence of civilization - The poem finally places human institutions, monuments, and cultures within a larger natural or cosmic process that outlasts them and may erase them.
- Ecstasy and altered consciousness - Several sections present visionary states, trances, or inspired speech as moments when ordinary language fails and a more intense, if unstable, knowledge breaks through.
- Mythic imagery - The poem draws on saints, lovers, planets, serpents, and cosmic patterns to elevate abstract thought into a charged symbolic world, giving philosophical ideas the force of myth.
Literary Devices in Supernatural Songs
- Free verse sequence - The poem is made of separate lyric units rather than a single metrical argument, and that fragmentation mirrors its shifting states of mind and visionary leaps.
- Symbolism - Yeats loads concrete images with spiritual meaning, so the tomb, the apple and yew, the moon, the serpent, and the sun become signs of love, death, cyclical power, or unity.
- Paradox - The poem repeatedly joins apparent opposites, as when hatred is treated as a path toward God or sexual passion becomes a route to transcendence.
- Allusion - Classical, Christian, alchemical, and historical references deepen the poem's claims and place its private visions inside a broad cultural and spiritual inheritance.
- Aphorism - Several sections compress their ideas into memorable, epigram-like statements, giving the poem the feel of visionary doctrine or prophetic shorthand.
- Repetition - Recurrent words and patterns, especially around joining, turning, and cycling, help create the sense of a universe governed by recurrence rather than progress.
- Imagery - Yeats uses concentrated sensory images, such as darkness, light, foliage, and cosmic motion, to make abstract speculation vivid and immediate.
- Personification - Abstract forces such as soul, thought, nature, and civilization are given active agency, which makes the poem's philosophical conflicts feel dramatized rather than merely stated.
- Antithesis - The poem often sets one state against another, such as mind and body or love and hatred, to sharpen its vision of struggle and transformation.
Symbolism in Supernatural Songs
- The tomb of Baile and Aillinn - The tomb stands for the union of love, death, and memory, suggesting that romance survives in transformed form beyond physical life.
- Apple and yew - These trees suggest a meeting of life and death, fertility and graveyard stillness, making them fitting emblems for the lovers' strange afterlife.
- Light - Light in the poem often marks revelation, spiritual knowledge, or a realm beyond ordinary touch, though it is fragile and only partly visible.
- The moon - The moon figures elusive, changing feminine energy and the cautious movement of desire, especially in the poem's playful dialogue between "He and She."
- The serpent - The serpent can suggest multiplicity, cyclical motion, and the dangerous complexity of life, especially when contrasted with unity or divine order.
- The Sun - The sun functions as a symbol of ultimate convergence, a point where scattered forces collapse into one consuming center.
- The needle's eye - This image suggests a narrow origin from which vast energies emerge, symbolizing hidden beginnings and the paradox of immense effects arising from something tiny.
- Mount Meru - Meru symbolizes a remote spiritual height outside civilization, a place where wisdom is gained by withdrawing from human history and its monuments.
Historical Context of Supernatural Songs
Yeats wrote within the modernist period, when many poets were turning away from straightforward lyric statement toward fragmentation, myth, symbolism, and philosophical compression. His work often draws on Irish legend, Christian imagery, occult speculation, and systems of recurrence and historical cycles, all of which were central to his late poetic imagination. Supernatural Songs belongs to that broader Yeatsian world of visionary thought, where spiritual and historical realities are treated as inseparable from poetic form.
The poem also reflects a wider early twentieth-century fascination with comparative religion, esoteric systems, and the instability of inherited belief. Yeats repeatedly reworks Christian, classical, and mystical ideas into a personal symbolic language, and this sequence shows that habit at full strength. Its compressed declarations, strange juxtapositions, and cosmic scale place it close to Yeats's later symbolic poems, where culture, body, and spirit are imagined as parts of a single, contested pattern.
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