The Ladys Second Song - Analysis

A song that refuses romantic innocence

This poem’s central insistence is blunt: love, as it is about to be lived in the bed, will not arrive as a single pure thing. It will split into parts, and the speaker prepares for that split with a mix of practical control and spiritual alarm. The opening question, What sort of man is coming To lie between your feet?, is not coy or dreamy; it drags sex into the foreground and makes the future lover a problem to be managed. The reply What matter, we are but women sounds like resignation, but it also becomes a kind of hard wisdom: since the man is unpredictable, the women will at least govern the conditions—washing, sweetness, the dried fragrance from cupboards, the sheet carefully made.

Domestic preparation as a form of power

The speaker’s instructions—Wash; make your body sweet—are intimate and managerial, as though seduction were a household ritual. The line about cupboards of dried fragrance is telling: desire is being staged with stored, curated materials, not left to spontaneity. That staging can read as a small territory of agency within a larger system the speaker can’t control: the man will come, and the women will be judged, used, or loved according to rules they didn’t write. The refrain The Lord have mercy upon us punctures the perfume and tidiness with fear. It makes the bedchamber feel like a moral danger-zone, or at least a place where consequences exceed anyone’s intention.

The man who wants incompatible kinds of love

The second stanza names the core contradiction: the coming man will perform two different loves, one for each woman. He will love my soul as though / Body were not, while he will love your body Untroubled by the soul. That division is cruelly neat. One woman is assigned “spirit,” the other “flesh,” as if the man can keep each relationship clean by amputating part of the beloved. The speaker doesn’t romanticize this; she describes it almost as a trick of appetite and self-image: he can Love love’s two divisions and still keep his substance whole. In other words, he gets to remain unified while the women are split into functions.

The poem’s turn: who is truly blessed?

The final stanza shifts from describing him to judging the terms of the split. Now it isn’t only his desire that divides love; it becomes a doctrine: Soul must learn a love proper to my breast, while Limbs get a Love in common With every noble beast. The phrase noble beast complicates the usual shame attached to bodily appetite; it suggests a proud, natural animal life rather than mere filth. And then the poem turns into an honest, destabilizing question: If soul may look and body touch, Which is the more blest? The earlier certainty—prepare the sheet, endure the situation—gives way to metaphysical unease. The refrain returns, but after this question it sounds less like conventional piety and more like a recognition that no neat answer will save them.

A sharper possibility: mercy from what, exactly?

When the speaker asks for mercy, it may not be only for sexual “sin.” It may be mercy from the very system that forces women into roles—one “soul,” one “body”—so that a man can feel whole. The poem’s most unsettling implication is that the women are expected to cooperate in their own partition, even to help make the bed for it, and yet the speaker still dares to ask whether touch might be more blessed than merely looking.

Where the song finally lands

By ending on the question of blessing, Yeats lets the poem hold two truths at once: the soul’s love can be refined and cherished, and the body’s love can be immediate and even “noble.” The tension is that the man’s version of this is exploitative—he separates what suits him—while the speaker’s question gestures toward a different integration, one where soul and body are not weaponized against the women. The repeated plea for mercy makes the whole song feel like a prayer spoken in a bedroom: not to erase desire, but to survive its divisions without being broken by them.