Solomon To Sheba - Analysis

Love as a Pen: the poem’s central claim

Yeats stages a debate that sounds like flirtation but lands like a verdict: love is the one subject that most powerfully narrows the mind, even for the most gifted minds. Solomon and Sheba are not portrayed as innocents overwhelmed by feeling; they are almost comically qualified to resist it. Yet the poem insists that precisely because they can range over anything that might the learned please, they can measure how total love’s enclosure is. Their day of talk becomes a kind of experiment whose result is confinement.

“Shadowless noon” and talk that goes nowhere

The first stanza gives the emotional geometry: All day long they stay in the one place, turning conversation into motion without progress. The phrase shadowless noon is crucial. At noon the sun is overhead; shadows disappear, and with them any sense of depth or direction. Their love-talk happens in a light that flattens the world, so it makes sense they go round and round. The simile like a old horse in a pound makes the enclosure feel physical and slightly humiliating: not a noble steed, but a worn animal circling a pen. Solomon’s kiss on her dusky face punctuates the speech, as if intimacy is both the cause of the circling and the reward that keeps it going.

Sheba’s sharp correction: the pen is in the mind

Sheba answers from a posture of yielding and power at once, Plated on his knees, an image that mixes ornament with submission. She pushes against Solomon’s framing. If he had opened a topic that would satisfy scholars, she says, then before the sun had even thrown Our shadows on the ground he would have discovered something worse: my thoughts themselves are a narrow pound. This is the poem’s first turn. We move from the idea that love is a repetitive subject to the more disturbing idea that the lover’s own mind becomes an enclosure. The contrast between shadowless noon and the later return of shadows suggests a shift from timeless, dazzled stasis to the reappearance of self-knowledge: when shadows come back, so does the recognition of limits.

Solomon’s final boast that doubles as surrender

In the closing stanza Solomon answers by expanding the claim outward. He asserts that no one Born under the skies can match their learning, and then uses that superiority to make love’s narrowness universal: There's not a thing but love can make The world a narrow pound. The tone here is proud, almost triumphant, but it’s triumph with a trapdoor. The more he insists on their unmatched intellect, the more he admits intellect doesn’t save them. Even kisses reappear—now on her Arab eyes—as if the body seals what the mind confesses. Love is not merely a topic among topics; it’s a force that can resize the whole world down to a pen.

The poem’s key tension: love as the only theme and the only jailer

There’s a contradiction the poem refuses to resolve, and that refusal is the point. Love seems small—the narrow theme of love—yet it has the power to shrink everything else. Learning is presented as vast, the sort of discourse that might the learned please, yet it’s useless against the mental corral love builds. And the lovers speak as if they dislike the circling—round and round like an old horse—while also continuing to kiss, continuing to stay in the one place. The poem lets love be both enchantment and confinement, a delight that also feels like being fenced in.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If Solomon and Sheba are the summit of wisdom, why does the poem make their wisdom sound like a kind of helplessness? When Solomon says love can make The world a narrow pound, he speaks as though he’s discovered a deep law—but the discovery doesn’t free him; it only names the bars. The day’s talk ends not with escape, but with a grander description of the cage.