The Madness Of King Goll - Analysis

A king who can quiet everything but himself

Yeats builds this poem around a stark contradiction: King Goll is powerful enough to make his word law and to drive tumult and war away, yet he cannot quiet the smallest, most ordinary sound that surrounds him. The repeated refrain—They will not hush—keeps insisting that nature’s restless noise outlasts royal authority. At first, the speaker remembers a reign of almost mythic competence: he sits on cushioned otter-skin, the land grows fatter day by day, and even the ancient Ollave (the learned elders) bless him for banishing the Northern cold. But every time that praise swells, the refrain returns like a symptom: the beech leaves keep fluttering. The poem’s central claim feels less like a moral and more like a diagnosis: the mind can become the one province no king can govern.

The first calm: abundance, law, and the “world-troubling seamen”

The opening presents order as something the king radiates outward. His voice shook even the hearts of dangerous sailors at Inver Amergin, and his protection extends to girl and boy and man and beast, as though the whole human and animal community shares one sheltered field. Prosperity follows: wild fowl increase; the land fattens. The tone here is confident, almost ceremonial, as if the speaker is reciting a boast that used to be self-evidently true. Yet the refrain undercuts that grand public music. When the poem says They will not hush, it doesn’t just mean the leaves are loud—it suggests the king is already listening too hard, unable to stop hearing. The beech leaves become an early warning that his peace depends on a fragile, inward balance.

War as competence—and the first crack in the self

In the second stanza, crisis arrives in a recognizably worldly form: a herdsman reports that pirates drove off his swine into dark-beaked hollow galleys. The king responds with practiced efficiency, calling battle-breaking men and loud brazen battle-cars, then attacking under the blinking of the stars. Even violence is described as a kind of restoration: he hurls the pirates into a gulph of sleep, and his hands earn many a torque of gold. This is still the old self—decisive, rewarded, publicly legible. But the refrain repeats unchanged, and that sameness matters: the king’s victories don’t modify the inner disturbance. The leaves “won’t hush” whether the world is peaceful or at war, which implies the source of the noise is not outside him. The tension sharpens: external enemies can be defeated; the real threat is unlocated and therefore undefeatable.

The hinge: “a whirling and a wandering fire”

The poem turns on one quiet word: But. While he is still in the act of killing—shouting, trampled, bubbling mire—something begins to grow in my most secret spirit: a whirling and a wandering fire. The phrase feels both elemental and psychological, like inspiration curdling into mania. The scene becomes feverishly heightened. The stars are suddenly keen, the men’s eyes are keen, and the king’s response is not command but compulsive motion: I laughed aloud and hurried on. He laughs at pure sensation—birds fluttered, starlight gleamed, clouds flew high, waters rolled—as if the mind can no longer sort meaning from stimulus. The tone shifts from heroic narrative to bright, unsettling exhilaration. And then the refrain lands harder than ever: if even joy becomes a symptom, the fluttering leaves are no longer background—they are the sound-track of unraveling.

Exile into the seasons: animal kinship and human unmaking

Once madness takes hold, the king’s relationship to the world flips. Instead of ruling people, he wanders with animals. He moves through a full cycle of seasons—summer gluts the golden bees, autumnal solitudes, wintry strands—as if time itself has become his only government. The natural images are vivid but not comforting: bees “glut,” trees turn leopard-coloured, cormorants shiver. He performs wild gestures—wave my hands, shake my heavy locks—and gains a strange authority that is not political but feral: The grey wolf knows me, he leads a deer by one ear, and the hares grow bold. It’s tempting to read this as freedom, but the refrain prevents that. The beech leaves still refuse to hush, implying that this new “communion” may be less harmony than disconnection: he can no longer live among human voices, so he accepts the company of creatures that do not ask him to be coherent.

The stolen drum and “inhuman misery”

The town scene shows how far the king has fallen from his former role as protector. He comes to a place that slumbered in the harvest moon and moves a-tiptoe, not as guardian but as trespasser. He follows a tramping of tremendous feet—a sound that could be fate, battle, or hallucination—and finds an old tympan (a harp-like instrument) Deserted on a doorway seat. He takes it into the woods and makes it sing with him: Our married voices wildly trolled. The word married is chilling here. It suggests a binding, an intimacy, but also a trap: he is now joined to an instrument abandoned by human life, and together they sing not of love but of inhuman misery. The king who once drove war away now carries a relic of culture into solitude, turning art into a companion for derangement.

The one cure: Orchil’s music, and the torn wires

The final stanza explains what the refrain has been circling: the madness has a name and, once, had a remedy. The king remembers Orchil, who at dusk shakes out her long dark hair to hide the dying sun and release faint odours—a sensual, intimate image that contrasts sharply with the earlier clang of brazen battle-cars. When his hand moved from wire to wire, the sound could quench the inner fire like falling dew. Music, touch, and perhaps love were not decorations; they were medicine. Now, though, the kind wires are torn and still, and he must wander through summer’s heat and winter’s cold. The poem ends by refusing closure: there is no cure, only the same relentless rustle—the beech leaves old—which now feels like time itself, endlessly audible to a mind that cannot rest.

A sharper thought the poem dares: what if his peace was always borrowed?

The poem quietly suggests that King Goll’s celebrated reign may have depended on the very thing he later loses. If music could quench the wandering fire, then the king’s public order might have been a fragile achievement resting on private tenderness. When the wires tear, it isn’t only a love story ending; it’s the collapse of the inner instrument that made kingship possible.