William Butler Yeats

 p.283

Supernatural Songs

‍

1. Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn

1. 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  p.284
   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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
‍

2. Ribh denounces Patrick

1. An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man,
   A Trinity that is wholly masculine. Man, woman, child
   (daughter or son),
   That's how all natural or supernatural stories run.
2. 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.  p.285
   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.
3. 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.
‍

3. Ribh in Ecstasy

1. 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.
‍

4. There

1. 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.
 p.286‍

5. Ribh considers Christian Love insufficient

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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!
‍

6. He and She

1. As the moon sidles up
   Must she sidle up,
   As trips the scared moon  p.287
   Away must she trip:
   'His light had struck me blind
   Dared I stop'.
2. 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.
‍

7. What Magic Drum?

1. 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.
2. 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?
‍

8. Whence had they come?

1. 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?
 p.288‍

9. The Four Ages of Man

1. He with body waged a fight,
   But body won; it walks upright.
2. Then he struggled with the heart;
   Innocence and peace depart.
3. Then he struggled with the mind;
   His proud heart he left behind.
4. Now his wars on God begin;
   At stroke of midnight God shall win.
‍

10. Conjunctions

1. If Jupiter and Saturn meet,
   What a cop of mummy wheat!
2. The sword's a cross; thereon He died:
   On breast of Mars the goddess sighed.
‍

11. A Needle's Eye

1. 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.
 p.289‍

12. Meru

1. Civilisation is hooped together, brought
   Under a rule, 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.

@incollection{E930001-100,
  author 	 = {William Butler Yeats},
  title 	 = {Supernatural Poems},
  editor 	 = {Richard J. Finneran},
  booktitle 	 = {The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats},
  publisher 	 = {Macmillan Press},
  address 	 = { London},
  date 	 = {1991},
  pages 	 = {283–289}
}
 E930001-100.bib