Supernatural Songs - Analysis

Ribh’s heresy: the holy is not gentle

Central claim: In Supernatural Songs, Yeats uses the voice of Ribh to argue—almost blasphemously—that the deepest spiritual knowledge arrives not through polite Christian love or stable doctrine, but through violent union: sexual ecstasy, hatred, and the stripping away of all comforting furniture of mind and body. The sequence keeps pushing toward a spirituality that is real only when it burns away the self’s explanations, whether those explanations are church teaching, romantic legend, or the civilised story of progress.

The tone is prophetic and abrasive from the start: an old, cracked-voiced holy man says Mark and digest my tale and insists the listener report what none have heard. The poems don’t want admiration; they want conversion—or at least disturbance.

The tomb: love purified into impersonal light

The first section sets the pattern: Ribh stands in the pitch-dark night above the lovers’ grave, under the apple and the yew that surmount their bones. That specific pairing matters: apple carries a folk sweetness and a hint of Eden; yew is graveyard-dark, funereal, long-lived. Their embrace is commemorated on an anniversary that is simultaneously their death and their first union, as if tragedy didn’t end the love but refined it.

Yet the poem refuses sentimental reunion. The miracle transfigured their bodies into pure substance where there is no touching, no straining joy, only whole is joined to whole. That phrase is both exalted and chilling: the lovers become an example of a union beyond sensation, like the intercourse of angels, a light in which both seem lost. Ribh reads his holy book not as a consoling scripture but as a witness to an inhuman clarity—the circle of light on grass broken by the leaves suggests revelation arriving imperfectly, filtered through the living world.

Denouncing Patrick: doctrine reduced to breeding

When Ribh turns on Patrick, the tone sharpens into scorn. He calls Christian theology An abstract Greek absurdity and mocks the masculine Trinity by dragging it into the most ordinary human pattern: Man, woman, child. He’s not merely being crude; he’s making a claim about how stories and metaphysics work. Everything we call supernatural repeats the structures of nature: things below are copies, and even Godhead, he insists, begets Godhead the way creatures beget creatures.

This section introduces one of the sequence’s core tensions: Ribh wants the divine to be more immanent than Christianity allows, but that immanence comes at the cost of reverence. God becomes a reproductive principle, a cosmic pattern of coupling and copying—all must copy copies. The poem’s images—juggling nature, a coil twined in embraces, the mirror-scaled serpent of multiplicity—make life feel like an endless engine. And yet the serpent is set against a surprising limit: everything that runs in couples shares a God that is but three. The poem can’t stop itself from returning to a triadic form even as it jeers at the Trinity; it both denies and reenacts what it attacks.

Ecstasy and amnesia: the soul speaks without understanding

Ribh’s mystical experience arrives as something the speaker himself can’t fully own. What matter that you understood no word! he says, admitting he spoke in broken sentences. Ecstasy isn’t presented as articulate wisdom; it’s a seizure of language and body. The most shocking claim is baldly stated: Godhead on Godhead is begotten in sexual spasm. But immediately a counterforce enters: Some shadow fell, and the soul forgot the cries that must return to the common round of day.

This is one of the sequence’s crucial turns. The poems want sexual joy to be cosmic, even world-making, but they also insist on its disappearance into ordinary time. Ecstasy produces metaphysics—and then leaves the self with almost nothing it can carry back except a conviction that something happened.

Where everything closes: gyres, serpents, and the midnight verdict

The short, chant-like pieces that follow—There all the serpent-tails are bit, There all the gyres converge in one, all the planets drop in the Sun—describe a universe that longs to collapse into unity. The images are closing images: biting tails, hoops knit, converging spirals, planets falling inward. It’s not peaceful oneness; it’s gravitational, consuming.

That appetite for closure returns in the sequence’s repeated midnight pressure. In Ribh considers Christian Love insufficient, the speaker announces he studies hatred, not love, because hatred is in my own control, a besom that can clear the soul. At stroke of midnight, the soul cannot endure bodily or mental furniture. Midnight here isn’t a romantic hour; it’s an existential deadline when the self’s props are kicked away. Even the shocking line Hatred of God may bring the soul to God is consistent with the earlier cosmology: the point is not niceness but purification by intensity, even if the intensity is negative.

A harder question the poems force: is hatred just another devotion?

Ribh claims hatred can free the soul from terror and deception, exposing impurities like a harsh light. But the poem also admits hatred is a light my jealous soul has sent. If the soul itself generates that light, then hatred may be less a path to truth than a new form of self-worship—another way the mind keeps control while pretending to surrender.

He and She: desire as pursuit and flight

The sequence doesn’t treat sexual energy as simple union; it also stages it as chase and recoil. In He and She, the woman moves like the moon: she sidles up and then trips away, fearing the moment she stops because His light had struck me blind. Her identity becomes a refrain—I am I, am I—and the strange rule is that The greater grows my light / The further that I fly. Power increases with distance, not closeness.

That paradox echoes the lovers at the tomb: true union may require the loss of ordinary touching, perhaps even the loss of proximity. The poems keep asking whether intimacy is a fusion, or a brightness that can’t be stared at directly.

History as possession: Charlemagne, Rome, and the sacred drama

In Whence had they come?, the poems widen from individual bodies to collective history, but they keep the same engine underneath: passion speaks lines it didn’t write. Lovers cry For ever and for ever and wake Ignorant of what they said; the Flagellant lashes bodies without knowing what master made the lash. Even empire is imagined as a kind of involuntary conception: the poem asks what sacred drama heaved through a woman’s body when Charlemagne was conceived, and what force beat down frigid Rome. The implication is unsettling: history isn’t guided by reason or virtue, but by subterranean scripts enacted through flesh.

Meru: civilisation’s illusion, reality’s desolation

The final section, Meru, lands the sequence’s spiritual brutality in a cultural diagnosis. Civilisation is hooped together under a semblance of peace by manifold illusion. Against that hooping, the poem insists man’s life is thought—not because thought saves, but because thought cannot stop Ravening and uprooting until it reaches the desolation of reality. The goodbyes—Egypt and Greece, good-bye, good-bye, Rome!—sound like a contemptuous funeral for the very monuments that once promised permanence.

And the last image returns to the beginning’s darkness: hermits on Mount Meru or Everest, Caverned in night under drifted snow, learn that glory disappears before dawn. The poems started with a circle of light on grass; they end with a knowledge learned in cold night—that everything we build, and even the stories we tell about God, is liable to vanish, leaving only the stark, recurring cycle of day and night, passion and forgetting, illusion and reality.