The Three Hermits - Analysis

Holiness in the Cold Wind: A Comic Scene with Serious Stakes

Yeats stages sanctity as something uneven and human, not a single clear achievement. The setting is stripped down to essentials: a cold and desolate sea, a place that feels like the edge of the world, where prayer should sound loud and pure. Instead, each hermit is caught in an almost embarrassing mismatch between intention and attention. One muttering a prayer can’t quite lift the moment; another is literally rummaged for a flea; the third, giddy with his hundredth year, sings unnoticed like a bird. The poem’s central claim is that spiritual life may be judged less by doctrinal correctness or visible discipline than by the strange, half-accidental ways devotion and distraction share the same body.

The Three Postures: Prayer, Parasitic Flesh, and Birdsong

The hermits aren’t just three characters; they are three postures toward the sacred. The first is the obvious one, prayer, but it’s described as muttering, a word that keeps it low, private, even tired. The second’s attention is grimly physical: rags and hair, and the flea that must be caught and cracked. The third seems least “serious” in a monastic sense, yet his song is the poem’s most persistent sound, returning at the end exactly as it began. That refrain-like return makes his birdlike singing feel less like a gag and more like an alternative kind of faith: unselfconscious, repetitive, and not aimed at impressing anyone.

The Door of Death, and the Humiliation of Sleep

The oldest hermit’s song supplies the poem’s haunting image: the Door of Death. He admits that despite standing upright on the shore, he Fall asleep when I should pray, and he repeats the failure Three times in a single day. The confession is almost comic—an elderly man nodding off at his devotions—but the door image raises the stakes. If death is a threshold with something waiting behind the door, then drowsiness becomes more than a personal flaw; it becomes a kind of spiritual vulnerability. The tension here is sharp: the poem refuses to let us decide whether this sleep is culpable weakness or simply the body’s innocent truth.

The Second Hermit’s Accounting: Earned Fate and Crowds of Rebirth

When the second hermit takes over, the tone shifts from personal confession to moral bookkeeping. His speech sounds like a ledger: given what we have earned, thoughts and deeds reckoned. He imagines failed holy men forced to Pass the Door of Birth again, harried by crowds until they develop the passion to escape. This vision is both punitive and strangely bureaucratic: salvation as an escape from noisy repetition, not as a communion. Yeats lets the second hermit’s confidence feel chilling, because it converts spiritual life into a system that can be plain to be discerned, leaving little room for mystery, mercy, or the small messes of living flesh.

Fearful Shapes versus Graceful Returns

The first hermit’s response—Moaned—introduces dread: the failed are thrown Into some most fearful shape. But the second hermit mocked that moan and insists they are not changed into anything monstrous; they might return as a poet or a king or even a witty lovely lady. This argument contains the poem’s most revealing contradiction. The second hermit claims strict moral accounting, yet he also imagines reincarnation as glamorous variety, almost a reward in costume. His certainty wobbles: is rebirth punishment, purification, or a theatrical second chance? Yeats doesn’t resolve it; he lets the doctrinal voice expose its own instability.

The Final Return to Birdsong: What the Poem Privileges

After the metaphysical debate, the poem returns to the bodily scene: the second hermit still handling rags and hair, still cracking the flea, and the third again Sang unnoticed like a bird. That ending matters because it refuses the debate’s hunger for closure. The last sound is not a conclusion but a continuation—an old man singing by the sea, not winning an argument, not being seen. In a poem full of doors—death and birth—the third hermit’s unnoticed song suggests a different threshold: the moment when devotion stops performing and simply becomes a way of breathing, even when nobody is watching and even when the body is failing.

One Hard Question the Poem Leaves Us With

If the second hermit’s universe is all earned outcomes and reckoned deeds, why does the poem keep returning to what can’t be reckoned: sleep, itching, age, and song? The repetition of unnoticed birdlike singing presses an unsettling possibility: that the truest religious act here may be the least legible one, the one no moral ledger can confidently price.