The Poetry Corner

Ribb Denounces Patrick

By William Butler Yeats

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.