The Author William Butler Yeats

Ribb Denounces Patrick

by


An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man --
Recall that masculine Trinity. Man, woman, child (a
daughter or a son),
That's how all natural or supernatural stories run.
Natural and supernatural with the self-same ring are
wed.
As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead
begets Godhead,
For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine
Tablet said.
Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind;
When the conflagration of their passion sinks, damped
by the body or the mind,
That juggling nature mounts, her coil in their em-
braces twined.
The mirror-scaled serpent is multiplicity,
But all that run in couples, on earth, in flood or air,
share God that is but three,
And could beget or bear themselves could they but
love as He.

5.5

facebook share button twitter share button reddit share button share on pinterest pinterest


Add Ribb Denounces Patrick to your library.

Return to the William Butler Yeats library , or . . . Read the next poem; Ribb In Ecstasy

© 2022 AmericanLiterature.com