From the 'Antigone'

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1929from The Winding Stair and Other Poems16 lines

Overcome—O bitter sweetness,Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl—The rich man and his affairs,The fat flocks and the fields’ fatness,Mariners, rough harvesters;Overcome Gods upon Parnassus;

Overcome the Empyrean; hurlHeaven and Earth out of their places,That in the same calamityBrother and brother, friend and friend,Family and family,City and city may contend,By that great glory driven wild.

Pray I will and sing I must,And yet I weep—Oedipus’ childDescends into the loveless dust.

Text: The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, London, 1933). Public domain.

In brief

Summary

A chorus hails all-conquering love, then mourns Antigone going to her death.

The poem opens by hailing love as the power that overcomes everything: rich men and farmers, sailors and harvesters, the gods on Parnassus and heaven itself. Love lives in "the soft cheek of a girl", yet it can hurl heaven and earth out of their places and set brother against brother and city against city. In the last three lines the voice becomes personal. The speaker will pray and must sing, but still weeps, because "Oedipus' child", Antigone, is going down "into the loveless dust".

Lines to remember

Overcome - O bitter sweetness,

Pray I will and sing I must,

Descends into the loveless dust.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 5Love's conquests
The poem begins mid-cry with "Overcome", addressed to love, the "bitter sweetness" that lives in a girl's cheek. Love has conquered the rich man, the "fat flocks" and fields, sailors and harvesters: the whole working world. The heavy f sounds of "the fields' fatness" make that world feel full and solid.
Lines 6 to 13Heaven and earth overthrown
Now love is urged further: to overcome the gods on Parnassus and the Empyrean, the highest heaven, and to hurl heaven and earth out of place. Its power turns destructive. Lines 10 to 12 set "Brother and brother, friend and friend" against each other, all "By that great glory driven wild."
Lines 14 to 16The lament
Praise turns to grief. "Pray I will and sing I must": the inverted words sound like a vow and a duty. Yet "I weep", because Antigone, "Oedipus' child", is going to her death. The final phrase, "the loveless dust", sets the grave against all the love the poem has praised.

Themes

The power of love

Love here is not gentle. It is a force that conquers every kind of person, then the gods, then the order of the universe. The paradox is packed into the opening words, "bitter sweetness", and into the gap between love's home in "the soft cheek of a girl" and the violence it can unleash, hurling "Heaven and Earth out of their places".

Love and strife

Pushed to its limit, love turns into conflict. "Brother and brother" recalls Antigone's two brothers, who killed each other in battle, and her own loyalty to one of them, which leads to her death. The "great glory" of love drives people "wild", and the poem does not pretend its glory and its damage can be separated.

Death

The last line brings the vast praise down to one young woman. "Descends into the loveless dust" is a burial, the one place love cannot reach. Placed at the close of a sequence about a woman's life in love, it gives that life a tragic ending.

Context

The poem closes "A Woman Young and Old", an eleven-poem sequence in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933); it first appeared in a book in The Winding Stair (New York, 1929). It is a free version of a choral song from Sophocles' Antigone, the Greek tragedy in which Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, buries her brother against King Creon's order and is sent to her death.

The companion sequence "A Man Young and Old", in The Tower (1928), ends the same way, with "From 'Oedipus at Colonus'". In the 1920s Yeats made versions of Sophocles' two Oedipus plays for the Abbey Theatre, so the Greek chorus was close to hand. Ending a woman's story with Antigone's descent gives the whole sequence a tragic frame.

Form

Sixteen short lines, mostly of four beats, in three uneven stanzas of six, seven and three lines. The rhymes are irregular and often far apart ("sweetness" and "fatness", "girl" and "hurl"). The repeated "Overcome" drives the verse on like a chant, and the last four lines rhyme alternately ("wild", "must", "child", "dust"), bringing it to a firm close.