A Needle's Eye

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1934from A Full Moon in March

About the text

Yeats first published this poem in 1934. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2030, and this site is served partly from American servers. So for now we give the notes without the full text; it will appear here in 2030.

It begins: All the stream that's roaring by

In brief

Summary

The roaring stream of all existence pours out of a needle's eye.

Four lines hold a whole vision of creation. Everything that exists, pictured as a roaring stream, came out of the tiny opening of a needle's eye. And it is still driven on from that same point, by things not yet born and things already gone. The huge and the minute meet: the flood of life has a source almost too small to see, and past and future press on it together.

Lines to remember

Came out of a needle's eye;

Line by line

Lines 1 to 4The stream and its source
The first couplet sets the enormous stream of life against the pinpoint it came from. The second adds that the source has not closed: from the needle's eye, the unborn and the dead still goad the stream forward, like drovers urging cattle. Creation is not a past event but an ongoing push.

Themes

Creation

The poem imagines all of existence flowing from a single point. A roaring stream pouring from something as small as a needle's eye makes creation feel both violent and mysterious. The image may also recall Yeats's cones or gyres, which widen out from a point.

Past and future

What drives the stream is not the present but what is not yet born and what has already gone. The dead and the yet-to-come both act on the living. Time here is not a line but a pressure from both directions at once, a favourite thought of Yeats's late mystical poems.

Context

The poem is one of the Supernatural Songs, first collected in The King of the Great Clock Tower (Cuala Press, 1934) and then in A Full Moon in March (Macmillan, 1935). It sits among other brief riddling pieces in the sequence, such as "The Four Ages of Man" and "Conjunctions", before the closing sonnet, "Meru".

Form

Four lines of four beats in two rhyming couplets (by and eye, gone and on). The short, bare lines contrast with the size of the subject, so the poem is itself a small opening through which something very large passes.