The Unappeasable Host - Analysis

Two kinds of children, two kinds of fate

Yeats sets up a stark comparison that becomes the poem’s argument: the supernatural children of Irish myth are carefree because they belong to a world where danger is distant and almost ceremonial, while the speaker’s real child is defined by vulnerability. The opening image is intoxicatingly bright: Danaan children laugh in cradles of wrought gold, a luxury so complete it feels unearned, even inhuman. Their laughter has a dreamy calm—half close their eyes—as if they are already half inside a trance or prophecy. In that mood, even their coming journey—riding the North when the ger-eagle flies—sounds like a mythic outing rather than a risk.

The chill inside the myth

But Yeats quietly chills that golden picture from within. The eagle has heavy whitening wings and, more unsettlingly, a heart fallen cold. The myth-world is not simply paradise; its beauty carries the coldness of something unhuman and unpitying. That phrase fallen cold suggests not just winter but emotional vacancy—an emblem of grandeur without mercy. So even before the poem turns to the speaker’s own life, Yeats seeds a tension: the splendid, legendary realm is alluring, yet its temperature is wrong for a human heart.

A father’s kiss, and the sound of graves

The poem’s hinge comes hard: I kiss my wailing child. Against gold cradles and mythic flight, Yeats gives us a basic, bodily gesture—pressing a crying baby to the breast. The intimacy is immediate, but it’s immediately invaded by dread: the speaker can hear the narrow graves calling both my child and me. That line compresses generations into one summons. The child’s wail is not just a passing discomfort; it becomes an audible sign of mortality, as if the living cry already contains the future grave’s call. The Danaan children can drift into half-closed-eyed ease; the human child cannot escape the body’s frailty, and the father cannot escape hearing time.

The desolate winds as a cosmic pressure

After the graves, the poem widens into a weather of the soul. The repeated address—Desolate winds—makes the world feel harried from all sides: over the wandering sea, in the flaming West, battering the doors of Heaven and the doors of Hell. These winds do not belong to one place or one theology; they sweep pagan sea-roads and Christian cosmology alike. And they don’t just howl; they make suffering audible in the afterlife, too, blowing many a whimpering ghost. That detail matters: Yeats imagines not triumphant spirits but frightened, diminished ones. The winds become a figure for relentless unrest—history, grief, desire, fear—anything that keeps the heart from settling. The speaker’s heart is not merely sad; it is shaken, as if this desolation has physical force.

Why the unappeasable host looks comely

The final comparison is the poem’s most disturbing claim: the unappeasable host is comelier than candles at Mother Mary’s feet. The phrase unappeasable host sounds like an army of desires or spirits that cannot be soothed—something closer to the restless Sidhe than to Christian consolation. By setting it against Marian candles (a classic image of gentleness, comfort, and intercession), Yeats stages a choice between peace and a fierce, storm-driven beauty. The poem’s central claim is that, for a heart battered by mortality and cosmic desolation, serene piety can look pale, even decorative, beside the terrible vitality of what will not be calmed. The contradiction is sharp: the speaker is a father yearning to protect a child from death, yet he is also drawn to the very forces—cold-hearted, desolate, unappeasable—that make protection impossible.

The poem’s hardest question: what kind of comfort can a shaken heart accept?

If the speaker can hear narrow graves calling, then candles at Mary’s feet may feel like a soft light placed too near an abyss. The poem doesn’t deny the reality of Christian comfort; it measures its emotional weight and finds it insufficient for the scale of the winds that beat on Heaven and Hell alike. What makes the ending so unsettling is that it doesn’t simply prefer myth over faith—it suggests that grief can warp taste itself, until the heart finds the storm comelier than mercy, because at least the storm feels truthful to the size of the fear.