The Lady's Second Song
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1938. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2034, 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 2034.
It begins: What sort of man is coming
In brief
SummaryThe lady prepares her maid to take her place in the lover's bed.
The second of the lady's songs from the story told in "The Three Bushes". She speaks to the chambermaid who will go secretly to the lover's bed in her place. She shrugs off the question of what sort of man he is, tells the maid to wash and sweeten herself, and offers dried scents for the sheets. Then she divides the lover between them: he will love her soul as if she had no body, and the maid's body without troubling about a soul. The last stanza asks which is more blessed, the soul that looks or the body that touches. Each stanza ends with the same prayer for mercy.
Lines to remember
Which is the more blest?
Line by line
Lines 1 to 7Wash and make ready
The lady brushes aside the maid's question about the man who is coming: they are only women, so what does it matter. She tells her to wash and make her body sweet, and offers cupboards of dried fragrance to scatter on the sheet. The prayer that closes the stanza is half piety, half nervous joke.
Lines 8 to 14Love split in two
She lays out her plan. The lover will love her soul as if bodies did not exist, and the maid's body untroubled by any soul. Love will be crammed into its two halves, yet the man himself is to stay whole. The neat arithmetic hides a real strain.
Lines 15 to 21Which is more blest
The soul must learn a love fit for a lady's breast, while the limbs share a love with every noble beast. Then comes the question the whole sequence turns on: if the soul may only look and the body may touch, which of the two is more blessed. The refrain answers nothing.
Themes
Body and soul
The lady tries to split love cleanly: her soul, the maid's body. The poem takes the split seriously and then doubts it. Calling bodily love something shared "with every noble beast" sounds dismissive, yet "noble" praises it, and the final question leaves open whether looking or touching is the greater blessing.
Mistress and maid
The song is spoken across a gap in rank. The lady gives orders about washing and scenting the sheets, yet she includes herself in "we are but women". The plan depends on the maid's body and silence, and the repeated prayer for mercy hints that the lady knows the arrangement is strange and perhaps wrong.
Context
First published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938). It belongs to the group that follows "The Three Bushes", a ballad about a lady, her lover and her chambermaid; three songs are given to the lady, one to the lover and two to the chambermaid. Yeats in his last years kept returning to the relation between body and soul, and this sequence plays the question out as a story of love, secrecy and substitution.
Form
Three seven-line stanzas in short lines of three beats, with the second, fourth and sixth lines rhyming (some only half rhymes, as "all" and "soul"). Each stanza closes with the unrhymed refrain, a line from church litany, which cuts across the lady's practical instructions like a sigh.