On Woman - Analysis

A hymn that can’t stay a hymn

The poem begins as a kind of boisterous prayer of thanks, but its central claim is more unsettling: the speaker praises woman as the most complete form of companionship precisely because she can undo a man’s composure, even his sanity. The opening blessing, May God be praised, sounds confident and public, as if the speaker has a settled doctrine. Yet the poem keeps breaking that confidence from the inside. What starts as admiration for a love that covers all a man brings becomes, by the end, an admission of obsession, rage, and helpless dependence on some one / perverse creature of chance.

Comforting surrender, or erasure of mind?

The first stanza makes its most provocative move early: woman is praised because she gives up all her mind. That line can read like a compliment to self-forgetful devotion, but it also reveals the speaker’s desire for a partner who does not resist him. He celebrates a friendship found in no man, one that does not quarrel with a thought because it is not her own. The tenderness he wants is inseparable from submission: he imagines a love that absorbs a man’s life as with her flesh and bone, a sheltering intimacy that also encloses and possibly smothers. The tension is immediate: the speaker’s gratitude depends on a picture of woman as both wholly intimate and curiously unopinionated, as if her virtue is to make his mind unchallenged.

Solomon: wisdom purchased with women

In the second movement, Yeats shifts from private praise to scriptural example. The speaker waves away pedantry and claims the Bible means Solomon grew wise by talking with his queens. Wisdom here is not scholastic; it’s learned through relationship, through a court full of women rather than a library full of books. But the poem also hints that this wisdom is costly and excessive. Solomon famously has too many loves to count, and Yeats leans into counting imagery: he can counted grass but can’t count all the praises due. The point isn’t only that women deserve praise; it’s that desire produces a surplus that reason cannot total up. The speaker admires that overflow, even as he fears what it does to a man.

Sheba at the forge: desire as heat, craft, and shock

When the poem names Sheba, it stops sounding like a sermon and starts feeling bodily. She isn’t a distant queen in fine robes; she is attached to iron, to a smithy fire, to metal that shuddered in the water. The imagery is startlingly physical: heat, quenching, recoil. It’s as if erotic experience is being described through metallurgy, where passion is something hammered into shape and then plunged into cold consequence. The speaker links this to the harshness of their desire, a phrase that refuses to romanticize. Even pleasure arrives with fatigue and animal release: stretch and yawn, then the pleasure that comes with sleep, and then again the Shudder that made them one. Union is not airy; it is muscular, spent, and a little violent, like hot iron meeting water.

The turn: asking God, then taking it back

A clear turn occurs when the speaker’s confidence collapses into self-interruption: God grant me - no, not here. He wants what Solomon had, but he stops himself mid-prayer, admitting he is not so bold now that he is growing old. The poem’s tone shifts from celebratory to chastened, then to desperate bargaining. He relocates his wish into a future cycle of rebirth: when the Pestle of the moon pounds up all anew and brings him to birth again. That image is both cosmic and domestic at once, as if the universe were a mortar grinding lives into fresh beginnings. The speaker’s longing becomes almost pathological: he wants not merely new love but the recovery of an old one, what once I had, and even the return of knowledge he has lost, what once I have known.

Rebirth as punishment: tenderness that drives him mad

The fantasy of starting over does not lead to peace. Instead, it leads to an escalating list of symptoms: driven mad, Sleep driven away, then tenderness and care turning into pity, an aching head, Gnashing of teeth, and despair. The poem’s crucial contradiction is here: the very qualities the speaker initially praises in woman—care, closeness, enveloping attention—become the forces that unmake him. Even tenderness is not soothing; it is invasive, sleepless, accusatory. The speaker seems to fear a love that, once regained, would not restore him but torment him with its intensity and its demands. The earlier image of being covered as with her flesh and bone now looks less like comfort and more like captivity.

A sharp question inside the obsession

If he knows this will end in Gnashing of teeth, why ask for it again? The poem quietly suggests an answer: the speaker doesn’t want serenity; he wants the extremity that proves he is alive, even if it destroys his sleep and balance. To live like Solomon is to accept that the dance Sheba leads is both delight and humiliation.

Solomon’s dance: chance, perversity, and the loss of control

The final lines blame it all on some one who is a perverse creature of chance, a phrase that strips romance down to contingency. The speaker cannot fully dignify the beloved with a stable identity; she is partly fate, partly accident, partly perversity. Yet he still wants to be led by her, to live like Solomon while Sheba led a dance. The poem ends, then, not with moral clarity but with submission of a different kind than the first stanza’s: not the woman giving up her mind, but the man giving up his control. Yeats lets praise and complaint share the same breath, until admiration for woman becomes inseparable from fear of the power she has to reorder a man’s life, his wisdom, and his peace.