The Peacock

The Peacock - meaning Summary

Pride Beyond Material Comfort

Yeats presents a figure who values making beauty over acquiring wealth. The poem imagines a creator who fashions a splendid peacock and cares more for its pride than for material riches or comfortable surroundings. Even in a bleak, wind-swept landscape, his commitment to aesthetic effect endures; after death his ghost is pictured continuing to add feathers, suggesting artistic legacy and self-fashioning as a form of immortality.