The Chambermaids Second Song - Analysis

A song that turns sex into aftermath

Yeats’s brief poem makes a blunt, almost comic claim: the pleasure of sex does not ennoble the man it describes; it leaves him emptied out and reduced. The title frames the voice as a working woman’s, a chambermaid singing a second song—suggesting she’s seen this scene before and knows what follows. What could have been erotic is treated as routine aftermath, and the speaker’s attention fixes not on intimacy but on the body’s collapse.

The worm as a chosen insult

The poem’s controlling image is the worm, repeated at the end of every couplet-like unit: Dull as a worm, Limp as a worm, Blind as a worm. Each comparison strips away dignity in a slightly different register. Dull makes the post-coital man mentally blank; limp makes the phallus not a symbol of power but a tired animal; blind makes the final state not just exhaustion but a kind of moral or spiritual unseeing. The worm also carries a faint undertone of decay: it belongs to earth, to what burrows and breaks down. By choosing it, the poem refuses romance and replaces it with something low, bodily, and unsparing.

From bed to rod to spirit: a downward inventory

The movement of the lines is a small descent. It begins broadly with pleasure of the bed, then zooms in to His rod and its butting head, and ends in the most abstract loss: His spirit that has fled. That sequence matters. It’s not only that the body goes slack; the poem insists that whatever animates him—pride, attention, tenderness, even basic presence—has already left. The chambermaid’s gaze is almost clinical in how it itemizes: first the scene, then the organ, then the vanished inner life. The tone is dry, faintly mocking, and deliberately unsexy; the blunt phrase butting head makes the act seem mechanical, even animal-like, rather than mutual or tender.

A hard contradiction: pleasure that looks like defeat

The key tension is that pleasure is named, yet everything we’re shown looks like depletion. The man has achieved the cultural “success” of sex, but the poem describes him as lessened—dull, limp, blind—while his spirit is not satisfied but gone. In that light, the chambermaid’s second song feels like a verdict repeated from experience: what men chase as potency can end in a kind of self-erasure, leaving behind not triumph but something small, soft, and sightless.