There
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: There all the barrel-hoops are knit
In brief
SummaryFour lines on a place where every opposite and cycle is complete.
A tiny poem of four lines, each beginning with the word "There". In that place, never named, everything that circles comes full circle: barrel-hoops are joined, serpents bite their own tails, all the gyres meet in one point and all the planets fall into the Sun. It is a vision of final unity, where the turning of history and the cosmos stops.
Lines to remember
There all the gyres converge in one,
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Where all is one
Four images of completion: hoops made whole, serpents swallowing their tails, the spiralling gyres of Yeats's system converging to a single point, and the planets dropping into the Sun. Each image is a circle closing, and the repeated "There" makes the place feel both distant and certain.
Themes
Unity
Yeats's thought is full of cycles and opposing spirals, the gyres of history and the soul. This poem imagines where they end: a place beyond time where every movement is gathered into one. The serpent biting its tail is an ancient emblem of eternity, and the Sun receiving the planets is the many returning to the one.
The beyond
"There" is never described, only pointed at. The poem gives no picture of heaven, just four symbols of closure. Its placing among the Supernatural Songs, after Ribh's ecstasy, suggests it is the state Ribh briefly touched, stated as plainly and briefly as possible.
Context
The poem is the fourth of the Supernatural Songs, which first appeared in a book in The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems (Cuala Press, 1934), and were collected in A Full Moon in March (Macmillan, 1935). The gyres are the interlocking spirals of Yeats's system in A Vision. The title probably echoes the translation of Plotinus that Yeats read, where "There" names the divine world beyond this one.
Form
A single quatrain of four-beat lines in two rhyming couplets, each line starting with the same word. The strict repetition and the snapping rhymes make it sound like a spell or a formula.