Two Songs from a Play

A pagan god dies, Christ is born, and history turns on its wheel.

Two songs about the turning of history. The first begins with a Greek myth: a "staring virgin" tears the still-beating heart from the dying god Dionysus and carries it away, while the Muses sing of the Great Year as if a god's death were only a play. Everything, the second stanza says, will happen again: another Troy, another Argo. Then a new virgin and her Star call out of the darkness, and the Roman Empire drops the reins. The second song brings in Christ, whose death and "Odour of blood" sweep away the calm reason of Greek philosophy and art. Birth, death and rebirth come round in cycles, and each new faith destroys the old order.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 8The god's heart

   A "staring virgin", usually identified as Athena, snatches the heart of the murdered Dionysus and bears it away still beating, so that the god can be reborn. The Muses sing of "Magnus Annus", the Great Year, "As though God's death were but a play": what is terror for the god is ritual to the watchers.

2. Lines 9 to 16Another Troy

   The repeated "Another" makes history a wheel: Troy will rise and fall again, and a new Argo will sail for a "flashier bauble" than the Golden Fleece. Then the pagan world gives way. The Roman Empire "stood appalled" when "that fierce virgin and her Star", often read as Mary and the star of Bethlehem, called "Out of the fabulous darkness".

3. Lines 17 to 24Christ and the Greeks

   Christ walks out of "that room" into "Galilean turbulence", and with him comes a "formless darkness" from the East. The last lines set the new faith against the old world: the "Odour of blood" of the Crucifixion makes "Plato's tolerance" and "the Doric discipline" of Greek thought and building useless.

Themes

Context

The songs are sung by the Chorus of musicians at the opening and close of Yeats's play The Resurrection, about the hours after the Crucifixion. They were collected in The Tower (Macmillan, 1928). The text printed here is the 1928 version: in later editions Yeats added a further stanza beginning "Everything that man esteems".

The "Another Troy" and "Another Argo" lines echo Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, which foretells the return of a golden age and a second Trojan War. The idea of history moving in great cycles of about two thousand years, each opened by a divine birth, is the one Yeats set out in A Vision, and it also shapes "The Second Coming" and "Leda and the Swan".

Form

Three eight-line stanzas, two in the first song and one in the second, in short four-beat lines. Each stanza rhymes abbacddc ("stand", "died", "side", "hand"), so it falls into two enclosed halves. The tight, chant-like rhythm suits songs meant for a chorus and makes huge events sound ritual and inevitable.