The Saint and the Hunchback
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Hunchback
Saint
Hunchback
Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryA bitter hunchback and a self-punishing saint compare the great men inside them.
A hunchback asks a saint for a blessing. He is bitter because he feels a lost greatness in himself: "A Roman Caesar is held down / Under this hump." The saint answers that God tests each man differently. He will go on blessing, but he beats himself night and morning to drive out the proud figures in his own flesh: Alexander the Great, the emperor Augustus and "That great rogue Alcibiades". The hunchback thanks all of them, and most of all Alcibiades. The joke is sharp: the hunchback longs for the very greatness the saint is whipping out of himself, and he likes the rogue best.
Lines to remember
A Roman Caesar is held down
God tries each man
That great rogue Alcibiades.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 5The hunchback's request
The hunchback asks for a blessing because he finds "great bitterness" in thinking of "his lost renown". He speaks as if he had once been famous, perhaps in another life: a Caesar is trapped "Under this hump". The short fifth line lands heavily on the hump itself.
Lines 6 to 13The saint's whip
The saint replies that "God tries each man / According to a different plan." He blesses, but he also lays about him "with the taws" to thrash out of his flesh Alexander, Augustus and Alcibiades. The great men of the ancient world live on in him as temptations to pride.
Lines 14 to 17Thanks to the rogue
The hunchback thanks everyone who has "stood" in the saint's flesh and blessed him, each honoured "in their degrees". But his warmest thanks go to Alcibiades, the charming rogue. The final line undoes the saint's solemnity with a wink.
Themes
Greatness and loss
Both men carry greatness inside them. For the hunchback it is a buried Caesar, a source of "bitterness" because it cannot get out. For the saint, Alexander, Augustus and Alcibiades are enemies to be beaten down. The same inner greatness is a wound to one and a temptation to the other.
Holiness and the body
The saint's holiness is a fight with his own "flesh": he thrashes it "night and morning". The hunchback's body is his burden too. The poem sets two kinds of physical suffering side by side, one imposed by nature and one chosen, and leaves the reader to weigh them.
Comedy
The poem is a small comic dialogue. The saint's grim list ends with "That great rogue", and the hunchback seizes on him: "But most to Alcibiades." The humour lies in the hunchback admiring exactly what the saint is trying to destroy.
Context
The poem was collected in the enlarged edition of The Wild Swans at Coole, published by Macmillan in 1919. It belongs with "The Phases of the Moon" and the fool songs that follow it in the book, where the hunchback, the saint and the fool are types of human being at the last stages of the moon's cycle. Yeats developed these figures in his prose system A Vision (1925), where the Hunchback, the Saint and the Fool belong to the final phases before the dark of the moon.
Form
A short dialogue in three speeches, set out like a scene with named speakers. The lines are mostly of four beats and rhyme in couplets ("bless" and "bitterness", "man" and "plan"), with one short line, "Under this hump.", that breaks the pattern. The neat couplets give the exchange the snap of an epigram.