Yeats and the Genesis of Supernatural Song

Abstract

Included among the poems published in The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934) are eight poems grouped under the heading Supernatural Songs, the first seven of which are numbered consecutively and are followed by a concluding sonnet.' That Yeats first composed seven poems in a sequence that had appended to it a poem of fourteen lines is neither surprising nor coincidental. For Yeats' public view of life and history, delineated by the intersecting cones in A Vision, has as its central motif the twentyeight phases of the moon. But all such apparent mathematical simplicity disappears the following year with the publication of A Full Moon in March (a title in itself significantly related to A Vision). In A Full Moon in March Yeats revised the Supernatural Songs and, while retaining the sequential order of the original poems, composed four others, adding in Ecstasy and There after Ribh Denounces Patrick 2 and adding What Magic Drum? and Whence Had They Come? after He and She. To consider in detail all of the Supernatural Songs is beyond the scope of the present essay. The first poem of the sequence, at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn, will replay close study, however. It is a poem for which no satisfactory explanation has been given; and yet it is generally considered one of Yeats' best poems, even though critical remarks have been directed almost invariably to the brilliance of the intercourse of angels, in effect placing another memorial wreath upon the grave of Emanuel Swedenborg, who invented such communion. Furthermore, the poem raises a problem of literary genetics, as thirty years earlier Yeats had tried to derive poetic significance from the legend of