Wisdom
Wisdom - meaning Summary
Faith Refined by Art
Yeats's poem argues that organized faith is shaped and softened by art, ritual, and class. Simple gospel accounts and a humble carpenter’s life are revised into ornate images—mosaics, statues, and regal domestic scenes—that shelter believers from harsher truths. The poem notes how this aesthetic and social framing transforms innocence into a respectable image called "Wisdom," suggesting that religious meaning is often the product of cultural embellishment rather than raw history.
Read Complete AnalysesThe true faith discovered was When painted panel, statuary. Glass-mosaic, window-glass, Amended what was told awry By some peasant gospeller; Swept the Sawdust from the floor Of that working-carpenter. Miracle had its playtime where In damask clothed and on a seat Chryselephantine, cedar-boarded, His majestic Mother sat Stitching at a purple hoarded That He might be nobly breeched In starry towers of Babylon Noah's freshet never reached. King Abundance got Him on Innocence; and Wisdom He. That cognomen sounded best Considering what wild infancy Drove horror from His Mother's breast.
But wisdom is talking in there somewhere like everything he wrote)