Cuchulain Comforted
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1939. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2035, 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 2035.
It begins: A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
In brief
SummaryIn the land of the dead, the hero Cuchulain sews shrouds with cowards.
A man with six mortal wounds, violent and famous, strides among the dead. The title names him: Cuchulain, the great hero of Irish legend. Eyes stare from the branches and vanish; bird-like figures in shrouds mutter together. He leans on a tree as if to think about wounds and blood. One Shroud with authority drops a bundle of linen beside him, and others creep up because he is still. They tell him his life will be sweeter if he obeys their ancient rule and makes a shroud, since the rattle of his weapons frightens them. He begins to sew. They explain that they are convicted cowards, killed by their own kin or driven from home to die in fear. Then they sing, with neither human tunes nor words, for their throats have become the throats of birds.
Lines to remember
They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6Among the dead
A man with six mortal wounds, violent and famous, strides among the dead. Eyes stare out of the branches and are gone; muttering Shrouds come and go. He leans against a tree as though to meditate on wounds and blood. The warrior is out of place in this whispering, half-seen world.
Lines 7 to 12The bundle of linen
A Shroud that seems to have authority among these bird-like beings drops a bundle of linen. Others creep up by twos and threes, made bold because he is still. The linen-carrier tells him his life can grow much sweeter, if he will do what they ask.
Lines 13 to 18Sewing the shroud
He must obey their ancient rule and make a shroud; the rattle of his arms frightens them. They thread the needles, and whatever they do, all must do together. The great fighter takes up the nearest linen and begins to sew, an act of humility he would never have made in life.
Lines 19 to 25Throats of birds
Before they sing, they tell him what they are: convicted cowards, killed by their own kin or driven from home to die in fear. They sing, but without human tunes or words, though all is still done in common. The last line completes the change: their throats are now the throats of birds.
Themes
Heroism and humility
Cuchulain was violence and fame itself, and the Shrouds fear the rattle of his arms. In death he joins the very people who were his opposite, cowards, and does their humble work. The title calls this comfort. The hero is not shamed but completed, taking on what his life left out.
Community
The Shrouds' rule is that all must act "together" and "in common". Cuchulain lived as a lone champion; now he must sew and sing as one of many. The afterlife here is a place where the proud self dissolves into a shared task, and the poem finds peace in that loss of singularity.
Death and transformation
The dead in this poem are changing: first shrouded shapes, then bird-like things, finally singers with "the throats of birds". Making a shroud is preparing for a further death or rebirth. Written as Yeats's own death approached, the poem imagines dying as a gradual, strange transformation rather than an ending.
Context
The poem was first published in Last Poems and Two Plays (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1939), alongside the play The Death of Cuchulain, which ends with the hero's death; the poem follows him beyond it. Yeats wrote it in January 1939 at Cap Martin on the French Riviera, in the last weeks before his own death there on 28 January.
Cuchulain, the champion of the Ulster cycle of Irish sagas, had been one of Yeats's central figures since the 1890s, in poems such as "Cuchulain's Fight with the Sea" and in a series of plays. In "The Statues" Yeats recalls Pearse summoning Cuchulain in 1916. Here, at the end, the hero of violence learns the ways of its opposite.
Form
Twenty-five lines of iambic pentameter in terza rima: eight three-line groups rhyming ABA BCB CDC and so on, each group's middle rhyme starting the next, closed by a single line. The interlocking rhymes, Dante's form for his journey through the afterlife, move the poem steadily forward, like the stitching of a shroud.
