The Saint And The Hunchback - Analysis

A blessing asked for, but not quite deserved

The poem’s sharp little drama turns on a paradox: the Hunchback asks for a saintly blessing, yet what he really wants blessed is not humility but wounded greatness. He tells the Saint to Stand up and bless a man who feels great bitterness over lost renown. Even before we learn anything else, the request is crooked in a revealing way. The speaker’s pain is not chiefly physical; it is historical and reputational. He imagines his deformity as a prison for a past self: A Roman Caesar is held down Under this hump. The hump becomes a lid, keeping an imperial identity trapped inside an ordinary, humiliated body.

The hump as a prison for glory

Yeats makes the Hunchback’s image do double work. On the surface, the hump is simply a disability. But the Hunchback describes it as a kind of injustice: a Caesar, the emblem of command and public honor, reduced to being “held down.” The bitterness comes from the mismatch between inner fantasy and outer fact. Importantly, he doesn’t claim he was Caesar in history; he speaks as if Caesar is in him, buried alive. That half-mystical claim lets the poem hover between reincarnation, delusion, and metaphor for thwarted ambition. Either way, his demand for a blessing is not a request to be changed so much as a request to have his grievance sanctified.

The Saint’s surprising confession: holiness as a daily brawl

The Saint answers with a theology that sounds calm—God tries each man—but immediately reveals a violent inner life. He says he blesses even as he lay about me with the taws, beating his own body night and morning. The usual image of a saint is gentleness; here sanctity looks like perpetual combat. And what he is whipping out of himself is telling: Greek Alexander, Augustus Caesar, and that great rogue Alcibiades. These aren’t generic “sins.” They are famous men, public men, men of conquest, charisma, and appetite. The Saint admits the temptation is not merely lust or anger but the seduction of legend—the desire to be someone whose name survives.

Shared hunger: the Saint and the Hunchback want the same thing

This is the poem’s key tension: the Saint and the Hunchback appear to be opposites—one blesses, one begs; one strives upward, one is bent down—yet both are obsessed with renown. The Hunchback mourns it directly. The Saint tries to purge it, but the purge itself proves the hunger’s strength. He is not thrashing away petty impulses; he is thrashing away emperors. That makes his holiness look both heroic and faintly theatrical, as if spiritual life is measured by the grandeur of the enemies you can name. The list—Alexander, Caesar, Alcibiades—suggests that even in denial, the Saint’s imagination keeps company with greatness. His very self-discipline is haunted by the glamour it rejects.

The twist: gratitude that chooses the “rogue”

The final exchange tightens the irony. The Hunchback offers thanks to all who have “stood / And blessed,” honoring them in their degrees, but then he singles out one figure: But most to Alcibiades. It’s a startling preference. Alcibiades is not praised for virtue but for a kind of brilliant wrongdoing, a reputation so vivid the Saint has to call him that great rogue. By choosing the rogue as his favorite, the Hunchback quietly reveals what kind of blessing he truly wants: not the Saint’s purity, but the permission to admire (and perhaps be) the dazzling, notorious self that refuses to be corrected. The gratitude isn’t submission; it’s a sly claim that even holiness cannot stop thinking about charismatic transgression.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If the Saint’s body contains Caesar and Alexander, and the Hunchback’s hump contains a Caesar too, then the poem implies a disturbing closeness between sanctity and vanity. Is the Saint’s whipping actually victory over pride, or just pride turned inward—an ego that prefers to imagine itself wrestling emperors rather than living small? And when the Hunchback asks to be blessed for his bitterness, is he seeking comfort, or recruiting religion as a witness for his grievance?

What Yeats finally satirizes: the glamour neither prayer nor pain can remove

By staging the poem as dialogue, Yeats lets each voice expose the other. The Hunchback’s misery is lit by the Saint’s admission that greatness is a temptation even to the holy; the Saint’s discipline is undercut by the Hunchback’s final toast to the rogue who won’t stay whipped out of the flesh. The poem’s bleak little punchline is that “renown” survives in both forms: in the Hunchback as resentment, in the Saint as a list of enemies he can’t stop naming. Blessing, here, doesn’t erase the desire to be legendary; it merely changes the costume in which that desire appears.