A Stick Of Incense - Analysis

Where does the poem say religious fury really comes from?

The poem’s central move is to take a huge historical and theological intensity—all that fury—and trace it back not to pure belief but to the muddled, intimate collision of doctrine with the body. Yeats frames the question like an investigation: Whence did all that fury come? But the options he offers immediately tangle the sacred with the biological: empty tomb (Resurrection) or Virgin womb (Incarnation). The poem suggests that the engines of religious passion are not only metaphysical claims but the emotional shock of those claims—sexless pregnancy, life after death—ideas that strain the mind and inflame communities.

Empty tomb vs Virgin womb: two scandals, one heat

Both images are provocations. The empty tomb is a vacancy that must be interpreted; the Virgin womb is a fullness that appears to break ordinary causality. By putting them in a quick either/or, Yeats makes them feel like rival sources of the same combustible energy: faith becomes a kind of pressure cooker created by impossible evidence and impossible origins. The word fury can point outward—conflict, persecution, zeal—but it can also mean inward turbulence, the mind’s anger when it cannot reconcile what it wants to believe with what it can understand.

Saint Joseph’s dread, then the sudden smell

The tonal turn happens with Joseph. He doesn’t respond with serene piety; he reacts like a man whose reality is dissolving: thought the world would melt. That phrase makes doctrine feel apocalyptic and destabilizing at a household scale. Then Yeats snaps the camera even closer: Joseph liked the way his finger smelt. The line is comic, but it’s also unsettlingly physical—skin, scent, private sensation. In four lines, Yeats drops from cosmic miracle to an almost embarrassed detail, as if saying that what we call religious crisis may be inseparable from ordinary human appetite and curiosity.

The poem’s key tension: holiness pinned to desire

Joseph becomes the hinge between reverence and the body. He stands near the central Christian mystery, yet he’s rendered not as a saintly symbol but as a man with sensory pleasures and suspicious thoughts. The contradiction is sharp: the same story that produces fury is also a story that produces a smell on a finger—something trivial, even faintly erotic. Yeats doesn’t simply mock belief; he exposes how easily the sacred gets dragged into the register of touch and desire, and how much violence or zeal might be fueled by that discomfort.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If Joseph can be both terrified and pleased—world-melting dread followed by a small bodily enjoyment—then the poem implies that religious history may be driven by that mix: awe and panic, devotion and repression, doctrine and the senses. Are we meant to hear liked the way as a confession of complicity—that the very miracle that destabilizes him also fascinates him? In that case, fury isn’t only about what people believe; it’s about what belief awakens in them.