The Peacock
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Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryAn artist who has made something proud needs no riches.
What use are riches, the poem asks, to someone who "has made a great peacock / With the pride of his eye"? The peacock is a work of the imagination, a thing of display and pride. Such a maker could be content on a bare, wind-beaten mountain. Whether he lives or dies "Amid wet rocks and heather", his ghost will go on happily "Adding feather to feather" to what he has made. Eleven short lines set the artist's lasting joy against the getting of money.
Lines to remember
With the pride of his eye?
Adding feather to feather
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6No need of riches
The opening question dismisses wealth. A man who has made "a great peacock" through "the pride of his eye" could live on "desolate Three-rock", a bare hill, and it "Would nourish his whim". The harsh adjectives "wind-beaten, stone-grey" make his indifference to comfort vivid.
Lines 7 to 11The ghost's work
Living or dead, among "wet rocks and heather", he will be content. His "ghost will be gay", still "Adding feather to feather" to the peacock. The repeated "For the pride of his eye" closes the poem on the same proud note it began with.
Themes
Art and pride
The peacock stands for a made thing of beauty and display, created "With the pride of his eye". Pride here is not a sin but a creative force, the artist's delight in what he sees and makes. The phrase appears twice, in lines 3 and 11, framing the poem like a motto.
Riches and the spirit
"What's riches to him" sets the poem against money from the first line. The maker needs only a bleak hillside to feed his imagination. Even death does not stop his work: the ghost goes on "Adding feather to feather", an image of patient, joyful making that outlasts life itself.
Context
"The Peacock" was collected in Responsibilities (Cuala Press, 1914), just after "The Witch", which pictures the pursuit of wealth as lying with a foul witch. The two poems make a pair: one scorns riches, the other shows what a proud imagination can live on instead.
Form
Eleven short lines of two or three beats in one stanza, with a web of rhymes: "him" and "whim", "peacock" and "Three-rock", "eye", "die" and "eye", "stone-grey" and "gay", "heather" and "feather". The last line repeats line 3, so the poem folds back on its opening image.
