Demon And Beast - Analysis

A brief holiday from the self’s two tormentors

The poem’s central claim is both grateful and grim: the speaker experiences a sudden, radiant freedom when his inner crafty demon and loud beast disappear, but he ends by insisting that such sweetness is never the achievement of a freeman—it is a temporary gift of the very forces that usually enslave him, or of simple bodily decline. From the start Yeats frames the mind as a battleground in motion: he has long been perned in the gyre, caught between hatred and desire, as if his whole personality rotates helplessly between two poles. When the demon and beast ran out of my sight, the relief is immediate and almost childlike: he sees my freedom won and imagines all laugh in the sun. The tone here is sunlit, released—yet the poem is built to show how quickly that light will be questioned.

The Gallery: history smiles back when the beast is gone

In the second movement, the speaker walks into a world of portraits, and his freedom changes the way the past looks. The glittering eyes in a death’s head—Luke Wadding’s portrait—says Welcome. The Ormondes nod, and even Strafford smiled. These are not neutral decorations; they’re embodiments of authority, policy, and old conflicts, hung in a Gallery that ordinarily might feel like a museum of domination. But the poem insists that the internal weather determines the external meaning: Now that the loud beast ran, there is no portrait that doesn’t beckon him into sweet company. It is a striking reversal: what might usually judge him now seems to approve him, even to rejoice that he understood Strafford’s plan. The release from inner compulsion produces an almost utopian clarity—all men’s thoughts grew clear—as if peace inside the self can briefly reconcile the self with history.

The lake’s “aimless joy” and the tear that interrupts it

The hinge of the poem is small but decisive: But soon a tear-drop started up. The tear isn’t caused by tragedy; it is caused by aimless joy. That phrase is the poem’s tell. The speaker stops by the little lake and watches a white gull catch a bit of bread. The scene is deliberately slight—almost embarrassingly ordinary—and Yeats leans into that ordinariness: the gull is gyring and perning, repeating the earlier language of the gyre, but now the spinning is not torment; it is play, appetite, instinct. The tear suggests the speaker knows this sweetness is precarious and perhaps not fully earned. The earlier Gallery moment felt like a mind rising above itself; at the lake, the mind is moved by something simpler and more bodily, and the emotion catches him off guard.

A “stupid happy creature” that still rouses the whole soul

The poem sharpens its contradiction through an almost comic bird: an absurd portly creature with a green-pated head that shook off the water. The speaker insists it is no more demoniac than a stupid happy creature—and yet it can rouse my whole nature. This is a confession that undercuts any heroic story the poem might have told about spiritual mastery. The speaker can be shaken, even remade, by something that has no ideas, no ethics, no plans at all. The tension is plain: he wants freedom to mean sovereignty of the self, but his deepest responsiveness is triggered by the self’s most unsovereign condition—being an animal among animals, susceptible to bright motion, bread in the air, water shaken from feathers. The sweetness is real, but it arrives through dependency rather than control.

Why “every natural victory” feels suspicious

The final section turns the earlier sunlight into a colder philosophy. The speaker becomes certain that every natural victory belongs to beast or demon: in other words, whatever wins in the realm of nature—appetite, vitality, impulse, cunning—does not belong to the liberated self he longs to be. He even claims that never yet had freeman Right mastery of natural things. That’s a bleak thought: it implies that the purest freedom is not a natural state at all, and perhaps cannot rule the body without becoming beastly or demonic itself. Then comes a further deflation: mere growing old, which brings Chilled blood, may be what produced this sweetness. The possibility is brutal in its simplicity—what felt like spiritual release might just be the body cooling, desire weakening, the loud beast tiring out. Yet the poem refuses to despise the feeling. The speaker’s dearer thought is not to solve the metaphysical problem but to make it linger, even half a day. Wanting sweetness, even if it’s compromised, becomes more honest than pretending to be above it.

Desert saints, starving soldiers, and the smallness of thrones

The closing allusions widen the poem’s argument: sweetness is not limited to comfort; it can appear in extremity. Yeats imagines a sweetness strayed through barren Thebaid—a landscape of desert renunciation—and by the Mareotic sea where exultant Anthony and twice a thousand more Starved upon the shore and withered to a bag of bones. The question is both shocked and scornful: What had the Caesars but their thrones? Against starvation, desert, and the strange persistence of sweetness, imperial power looks thin, almost irrelevant. This ending doesn’t resolve the earlier claim that natural victory belongs to beast or demon; instead it complicates it. If sweetness can visit the dying and the renunciant, then it is not simply the reward of appetite. It is something that slips past categories—beast, demon, freeman, emperor—and arrives where it will.

The poem’s hardest implication

If the speaker is right that the freeman has no Right mastery of nature, then the desire to control the demon and beast may itself be part of their game: another form of craft or noise. The tear at the little lake may be the poem’s most truthful moment—an acknowledgment that sweetness is precious precisely because it cannot be commanded, only noticed as it passes.