Ribh denounces Patrick
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: An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man
In brief
SummaryRibh rejects Patrick's all-male Trinity for one of man, woman and child.
Ribh, the old hermit of the Supernatural Songs, attacks the Trinity taught by St Patrick. An all-male Trinity is an abstract Greek absurdity, he says: every story, natural or supernatural, runs man, woman and child. The divine begets as the human and animal do, for as the ancient Emerald Tablet taught, things below copy things above. Everything on earth must go on copying and multiplying, and nature coils herself through lovers' embraces. Only God, who is three, could love so perfectly as to beget or bear himself.
Lines to remember
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 3A Greek absurdity
Ribh says an abstract Greek absurdity has crazed Patrick. He should remember that masculine Trinity and put beside it a truer one: man, woman and child, the pattern of every story, natural or supernatural.
Lines 4 to 6As below, so above
Nature and the supernatural are married with the same ring. Godhead begets Godhead just as a man, a beast or a short-lived fly begets its young, since things below are copies of things above, as the "Great Smaragdine Tablet" said.
Lines 7 to 9Juggling nature
Yet earthly creatures can only copy copies and multiply their kind. When the fire of passion dies down, damped by body or mind, nature mounts up again, her coil twined in their embraces, and the cycle goes on.
Lines 10 to 12Could they love as He
The serpent with mirror scales stands for multiplicity. All creatures that pair on earth, in water or air share in the God who is three, and could beget or bear themselves if only they could love as God loves.
Themes
Sex and the divine
Ribh's objection is that the orthodox Trinity leaves out woman and sexual love. His Trinity is a family, and his God begets as creatures beget. The poem treats sexual union as an image of divine creation, a theme that runs through the whole Supernatural Songs sequence.
Copies and multiplicity
The Hermetic idea that "things below are copies" governs the poem. Human love copies divine love, but imperfectly: passion burns out, and nature keeps multiplying, a coiling serpent of endless copies. Only the divine love is complete enough to create itself.
Context
The poem is the second of the Supernatural Songs, which first appeared in a book in The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems (Cuala Press, 1934), and were collected in A Full Moon in March (Macmillan, 1935). Ribh is an old Irish hermit of Yeats's invention, set against St Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland. The Emerald Tablet is a short text of Hermetic philosophy, long attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and famous for teaching that what is below is like what is above.
Form
Four three-line stanzas of very long lines, each stanza on a single rhyme (man, son, run; wed, Godhead, said; and so on). The lines grow longer as the argument crowds in, and the triple rhymes echo the poem's insistence on threes.