Veronica's Napkin

W. B. Yeatsfirst published 1933from The Winding Stair and Other Poems

About the text

Yeats first published this poem in 1933. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2029, 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 2029.

It begins: The Heavenly Circuit; Berenice's Hair

In brief

Summary

The religion of the stars set against the bloodstained image of Christ.

The first six lines are a hymn to the heavens as a religious symbol: the circling stars, the constellation called Berenice's Hair, the pole on which the sky's tent seems to hang, the drapery of the sky itself. God the Father and all his orders of angels, who made that vast glory, are gathered into the eye of a needle. The last two lines turn away. Some people found a different pole, the Cross, and where it stood there was only a pattern on a cloth dipped in blood.

Lines to remember

A pattern on a napkin dipped in blood.

Line by line

Lines 1 to 6The heavenly circuit
A list of names for the night sky builds into a vision of cosmic order, with the heavens as a great tent held up by a pole. Then the scale collapses: the Father and his angels stood within "a needle's eye". The immeasurable is compressed into a point, as mystics describe God being wholly present in the smallest place.
Lines 7 to 8A different pole
The couplet sets a second religion against the first. Instead of the pole of the heavens, some found another pole, the upright of the Cross, and instead of the starry pattern of the sky, the image of a face printed in blood on a cloth.

Themes

Two kinds of faith

The poem contrasts a faith that looks up to the stars, an ordered, geometrical religion of the heavens, with the Christian faith that centres on suffering and a human face. The title names the second. The exclamation of the third line honours the first, but the blood of the last line has the final word.

The image

Both halves end in an image: the vast heaven fitted inside a needle's eye, and the pattern on a napkin. Yeats was fascinated by the way belief fixes itself in a picture. The legend of Veronica is the story of the first such picture, a face impressed directly by the one it represents.

Context

The poem was collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). Its title refers to the Christian legend of Veronica, a woman who wiped Christ's face with a cloth as he carried the Cross to Calvary, and found his likeness left on it. The cloth, venerated as a relic, became known as the veil or napkin of Veronica.

The needle's eye returns in the short later poem "A Needle's Eye", in A Full Moon in March, as the tiny opening from which the whole rushing stream of existence pours. In both poems the vastness of creation is gathered into, or born from, a single point, an idea Yeats found in mystical writing of many traditions.

Form

Eight lines of iambic pentameter rhymed ABABAB CC, like one stanza of ottava rima split into six lines and a detached couplet. The white space before the couplet does the work of the poem's turn, separating the starry religion from the bloody one.