The Spirit Medium
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: Poetry, music, I have loved, and yet
In brief
SummaryA medium haunted by spirits turns from art to digging the garden.
The speaker has loved poetry and music, but spirits keep crowding into his soul: the newly dead, and souls born or yet to be born, spinning in a band. To escape them he bends to the spade or gropes in the earth with a dirty hand. The second stanza says why: some unborn spirits are not individuals at all but endlessly copy one action. The third gives the root of his fear: an old ghost's thoughts are lightning, and to follow them is to die. So he has banished art, and turns to the stupidity of root, shoot, blossom and clay, which makes no demands.
Lines to remember
I bend my body to the spade
Line by line
Lines 1 to 8Crowded by the dead
He has loved poetry and music, yet the newly dead enter his soul, escaping the confusion of the deathbed, along with souls born and unborn circling in a band. His response, repeated in each stanza's closing pair, is to bend his body to the spade and grope in the soil.
Lines 9 to 16Spirits without selves
He would not call up some of the unborn, because they are not individual: they merely copy one action over and over, shaping it out of dust or sand. There is horror in a spirit without a self, and digging is the refuge again.
Lines 17 to 24The safety of clay
An old ghost's thoughts are lightning, and to follow them is to die. So poetry and music are banished. The garden's plain stupidity, root, shoot, blossom and clay, asks nothing of him, and he returns to the spade and the dirty hand.
Themes
The spirit world
Yeats took seriously the idea that the dead and the unborn could press on the living. Here that contact is exhausting and dangerous. The spirits are confused, impersonal or overwhelming, and the ghost's thought is lightning that kills whoever follows it. The medium's gift has become a burden.
Art and the earth
Poetry and music are linked with the spirit world, and the speaker gives them up for the soil. The spade is a kind of grounding: physical work, dirt and growing things that make "no demand". The refrain turns gardening into self-protection, a way to keep body and mind in the ordinary world.
Context
First published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938). Yeats had attended seances since his youth, and after his marriage in 1917 his wife's automatic writing supplied much of the system of A Vision. The word "Perning" is his own, from a Sligo word for a spool; he also used it in "Sailing to Byzantium" for a spinning, spiralling motion.
Form
Three eight-line stanzas of mostly three-beat lines, rhyming the second with the fourth line and the sixth with the eighth, often by half rhyme ("die" and "stupidity"). The last two lines of each stanza are a fixed refrain, and the repeated line about the begotten and unbegotten links the first two stanzas like a chain.
