Solomon And The Witch - Analysis

A love scene that opens into cosmology

The poem’s central claim is startling: sexual union can feel like the end of the world, not because it erases reality but because it briefly fuses the divided self into a single, incandescent moment. The opening is intimate and oddly estranged at once. An Arab lady lies under the wild moon on a grassy mattress with great Solomon, and yet she cries out in a strange tongue, Not his, not mine. That involuntary speech signals a force larger than the couple—something that speaks through them, or something in them that doesn’t belong to either identity. Yeats frames desire as a doorway: it begins in the body, then pushes into myth, prophecy, and an argument about whether anything truly changes.

The translator of all sounds

Solomon answers as Who understood everything that can be uttered—sighed, sung, howled, even miau-d and brayed. This isn’t just a flourish; it matters that the poem moves from human language to animal cries. The woman’s strange tongue becomes part of a whole spectrum of voiced life, as if eros has thrown her back into a pre-human register. Solomon’s comprehension casts him as a kind of interpretive machine, but also as someone who can treat the most private sounds of love as meaningful signs—omens with historical and metaphysical weight.

The cockerel and the apple: a crow across the Fall

Solomon’s first explanation is an allegory: A cockerel / Crew from a blossoming apple bough Three hundred years before the Fall, and then fell silent until now. The apple bough can’t help recalling the biblical Fall; the bird’s crow becomes a time-bridging signal that tries to reverse catastrophe. When it crows again, it does so because Chance has finally aligned with Choice. That pairing becomes the poem’s governing tension: are the pivotal moments of a life (or of history) willed, or do they simply happen? The cockerel thinks the alignment means this foul world is dead at last—as if perfect union would properly end the compromised, suffering world. Even the phrase brigand apple suggests the fruit as a thief that stole humanity into labor, shame, and mortality; love, in this logic, might steal it back.

Love’s cruelty: the “spider’s eye” that hunts pain

Yeats refuses to let the erotic or mystical moment stay pure. Solomon admits that love has a spider’s eye—a chilling image of precision, appetite, and entrapment. Love doesn’t merely comfort; it find out an appropriate pain, then tests a lover with the same dual tyrants, Choice and Chance. The poem’s tenderness is braided with suspicion: passion is concentrated in the glance, yet that concentration can become a cruelty, as though the body’s intensity puts every nerve on trial. Even when the violence seems finished—when at last that murder’s over—the bride-bed may bring despair. Why? Because each person carries an imagined image of the other and then confronts a real image. The contradiction is sharp and human: the very intimacy that promises fusion also sharpens the difference between fantasy and fact.

“Oil and wick”: when two become a single light

Against that grim realism, Solomon still proposes a metaphysical peak. The world ends—at least experientially—when these two things become a single light, when oil and wick are burned in one. Oil and wick are distinct, and their union is literally consumptive: the flame exists by using them up. Yeats’s claim is not that love is safe, but that it can be total. In that instant, separateness is swallowed into radiance, and the moon itself becomes a blessing: a blessed moon last night Gave Sheba to her Solomon. The name Sheba lifts the unnamed Arab lady into a legendary figure, suggesting that the private bedroom scene participates in an archetypal story—an ancient encounter between wisdom and desire.

The hinge: “Yet the world stays.”

The poem turns on the woman’s flat objection: Yet the world stays. It’s almost curt, the voice of someone refusing grand metaphysics because dawn still comes and consequences still stand. Solomon’s reply concedes the point and reroutes the meaning: if the world remains, then the cockerel found us in the wrong. The bird’s crow was premature—or the lovers’ experience didn’t rise to the cosmic threshold it imagined. And then Yeats lands on a more intimate problem: Maybe an image is too strong / Or maybe is not strong enough. That ambivalence is crucial. The imagined image might overpower reality (too strong), making the real lover a disappointment; or it might fail to sustain desire (not strong enough), leaving the lovers unable to transform their experience into the single light Solomon describes.

A silent grove, crushed grass, and the decision to try again

The final scene strips away the grand allegory and returns to physical aftermath. The night has fallen; there is not a sound in the forbidden sacred grove except a petal hitting the ground. The sacred place is also forbidden—holiness mixed with trespass, like passion itself. No one can see them, only the crushed grass where we have lain, a blunt, bodily record that undercuts Solomon’s lofty language. Yet the moon is wilder every minute, as if nature intensifies alongside desire. The woman’s cry—O! Solomon! let us try again—is not naïve repetition so much as insistence: if the world didn’t end, they will pursue the moment that felt like it might.

If the world “ends,” who gets to live in the aftermath?

One unsettling implication shadows the poem’s logic. If the single light is real, it requires something like burning—oil and wick consumed together. Is the poem praising a union that destroys the selves that enter it? Or is it admitting that without that risk—the risk of being used up—love stays trapped at the level of imagined image and disappointment?

What the poem finally insists on

By the end, Yeats doesn’t settle whether the cockerel was right or wrong; he stages the argument inside the lovers’ bodies. The poem insists that love is both an engine of myth and a stubbornly physical act: it can summon eternity and still leave crushed grass. Its most honest position lies in the tension between Solomon’s grand explanation and the woman’s grounded refutation. The world may stay, but something in the lovers keeps reaching for the moment when, by some alignment of Choice and Chance, the divided materials of a life flare into one flame.