Tom at Cruachan

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1932from The Winding Stair and Other Poems

About the text

Yeats first published this poem in 1932. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2028, 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 2028.

It begins: On Cruachan's plain slept he

In brief

Summary

Mad Tom sings of how Eternity and Time bred the world.

A six-line song of Tom the lunatic. He slept on the plain of Cruachan, the ancient royal seat of Connacht, and felt bound to sing in rhyme the thing that most shook his soul. His vision is a myth of creation told in the language of the stud farm: Eternity, a stallion, mounted Time, a mare, and begot the world as their foal. The earthy image turns an abstract idea into something wild and physical.

Lines to remember

Mounted the mare of Time,

Line by line

Lines 1 to 3Sleeper on the plain
Tom slept on Cruachan's plain, a place of kings and legends, and must now sing in rhyme whatever most shook his soul. The setting hints that his vision comes from the old sacred ground of Ireland.
Lines 4 to 6Stallion and mare
The vision: the stallion Eternity mounted the mare of Time and begot the foal of the world. The clipped old verb for begat lends the image a biblical ring, while the horses keep it rough and bodily.

Themes

Eternity and time

The poem compresses a whole philosophy into one image. The world is born from the union of the eternal and the temporal, neither alone. Tom's myth places the physical world, and everything in it, as the living offspring of that meeting.

Wisdom of the mad

The truth is spoken by a lunatic who has slept on haunted ground. Like Crazy Jane in the same sequence, Tom sees what respectable people miss, and he says it in coarse, vivid terms. Madness here is a kind of inspiration.

Context

Part of the sequence "Words for Music Perhaps", first gathered in Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems (Cuala Press, 1932) and collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). It is one of three poems about Tom the lunatic, with "Tom the Lunatic" and "Old Tom Again". Cruachan, now Rathcroghan in County Roscommon, was the seat of Queen Maeve in the old Irish tales.

Form

Six short lines of three beats, rhyming across the halves: the first line with the fourth, the second with the fifth, and the third with the sixth by half rhyme. The last three lines are the song he sings, set off in quotation marks.