Ribh in Ecstasy
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: What matter that you understood no word!
In brief
SummaryRibh returns from a moment of mystical ecstasy to ordinary life.
Ribh has just come out of a trance. His listener understood none of it, and he does not mind: he was only repeating in broken sentences what he had heard. For a moment his soul found all happiness in its own source. He glimpsed the divine begetting itself, in an image of sexual union. Then a shadow fell, he forgot those cries of love that come out of quiet, and he had to take up the common round of the day again.
Lines to remember
And must the common round of day resume.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Broken sentences
It does not matter that the listener understood nothing. Ribh was speaking or singing in fragments what he had heard in vision. His soul had found complete happiness in its own "cause or ground", the source from which it comes.
Lines 5 to 8The shadow falls
What he saw was Godhead begetting Godhead in a sexual spasm, the divine creating itself as lovers create. Then a shadow fell. His soul forgot the amorous cries that rise out of stillness and had to return to the everyday.
Themes
Mystical vision
The poem is about the aftermath of ecstasy: speech that makes no sense to others, a happiness beyond words, then forgetting. Ribh cannot bring the vision back with him; he can only report that it happened. The last line is the ordinary world of daily routine closing in again.
Divine love as sexual
As in "Ribh Denounces Patrick", Yeats imagines the life of God in sexual terms: Godhead begets Godhead in a spasm of love. The "amorous cries" come out of quiet, as if the stillness of contemplation and the heat of passion were one thing.
Context
The poem is the third of the Supernatural Songs, the sequence spoken largely by Ribh, an old Irish hermit of Yeats's invention. It first appeared in a book in The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems (Cuala Press, 1934), and was collected in A Full Moon in March (Macmillan, 1935).
Form
Eight lines of five-beat verse in rhyming couplets. The rhymes are firm and plain, but the sentences break across them, especially at the fifth and sixth lines, where the vision spills over a line-ending and then stops short in a sentence of three words.