On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac

A poet speaks to a painted centaur about his wasted and ripened work.

The poet addresses a black centaur in a painting, a wild half-horse creature stamping at the edge of a dark wood full of "horrible green parrots". He admits that his own works have been "stamped down into the sultry mud" by such wildness. Once, driven "half insane" by the lure of some "green wing", he ground ancient "mummy wheat" in the dark; now he brings out a rich old wine instead. The poem ends tenderly, asking the centaur to sleep and trusting it, above all, to keep watch on those birds.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 4Hooves in the mud

   The centaur's hooves have stamped at "the black margin of the wood", where "horrible green parrots call and swing". The poet's works are "stamped down" too. "I knew that horse play" is a grim pun: he recognised the creature's wild energy and knew it "for a murderous thing".

2. Lines 5 to 9Mummy wheat

   Only what "wholesome sun has ripened" is good to eat. Yet he, maddened by "some green wing", gathered "old mummy wheat" in "the mad abstract dark", ground it "grain by grain" and baked it slowly. The patient labour of the lines suits long, strange study pursued far from daylight.

3. Lines 10 to 12The wine barrel

   The "but now" at the end of line 9 marks the turn. Instead of dry bread he brings out "full flavoured wine" from a barrel found where "seven Ephesian topers slept", sleepers so deep that Alexander's whole empire passed them by. Age has turned into ripeness and flavour.

4. Lines 13 to 16Sleep and watch

   He tells the centaur to "sleep a long Saturnian sleep", a sleep of the golden age. Then comes a startling confession of love, "better than my soul", and a last trust: none is so fit as the centaur to keep "Unwearied eyes" on the green birds that once drove him mad.

Themes

Context

Edmund Dulac was an artist and friend of Yeats who designed masks and music for his plays, and the poem responds to a painting of his. It first appeared in a book in Seven Poems and a Fragment (Cuala Press, 1922) as "Suggested by a Picture of a Black Centaur". It became "On a Picture of a Black Centaur" in The Tower (1928), where it was revised, and Dulac's name was added to the title in 1933.

The mad labour over "mummy wheat" in "the mad abstract dark" is often read as Yeats looking back on years of occult and philosophical study, set against the fuller, riper poetry of his later books. The poem gives no key to its symbols, though, and the green parrots can be read more widely as any obsession that lures an artist away from the sunlit, "wholesome" world.

Form

Sixteen long lines, most with six beats, printed as one block but rhyming in alternate pairs (abab) in four groups of four. Several rhymes are slant ("wood" and "mud", "now" and "knew"), and the sentences run over line ends, so the verse has the heavy, driving movement of the centaur itself.