W.B. Yeats' "Lullaby"

What does Yeats have to say about desire, love and lust? Let’s find out today in his famous poem Lullaby. 

You can also watch my analysis of the poem here. 

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Lullaby - W.B. Yeats Beloved, may your sleep be sound That have found it where you fed. What were all the world's alarms To mighty Paris when he found Sleep upon a golden bed That first dawn in Helen's arms? Sleep, beloved, such a sleep As did that wild Tristram know When, the potion's work being done, Roe could run or doe could leap Under oak and beechen bough, Roe could leap or doe could run; Such a sleep and sound as fell Upon Eurotas' grassy bank When the holy bird, that there Accomplished his predestined will, From the limbs of Leda sank But not from her protecting care.

The infamous tale of Arachne—the young girl who challenges the goddess Minerva to a tapestry weaving contest—is told in Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, yet perhaps slightly lesser known is the story of Jupiter (the Roman name for the Greek God Zeus) and Leda, which appears woven in Arachne’s tapestry. Arachne recalls Jupiter’s rape of a woman named Leda, who is subsequently transformed into a swan—one of many metamorphoses we find in Ovid’s collection. Taking up this same story in his poem Lullaby, William Butler Yeats, on the other hand, invites us to consider sexual desire as benign and innocent rather than as destructive and violent. In Lullaby, Yeats turns several violent mythological tales on their heads as he presents his own interpretation—or, perhaps, presents an ironic commentary on the violence of love.

Yeats first draws a parallel between lover and child before placing a peaceful bedroom scene against the backdrop of a violent war. In the first stanza of the poem, he paints a portrait of erotic bliss between the mythological Paris and Helen—two figures from Homer’s Iliad—and blurs the boundaries between a parent-child and a lover-lover relationship, thereby ascribing a childlike playfulness to erotic desire. Rather than presenting the standard condemnatory picture of desire gone awry—the classic take on Paris, whose lust for Helen is violent enough to provoke the Trojan War—Yeats depicts an alternate paradigm in which Paris’s desire for Helen is gentle and innocent, absolving erotic desire of its negative qualities. 

As the poem’s title suggests, our first stanza begins with a parent (let us assume a mother, for simplicity’s sake) who addresses a child about to go to sleep. She calls her child “beloved,” an address typical of one lover to another (perhaps of Paris to Helen), and tells her child that he has found “sleep” where he “fed,” highlighting two of the most fundamental human needs and portraying a child’s most basic desires. Just as a child desires a “sound” sleep, so does Paris long for peace through sleep in Helen’s arms. Yeats’ language here is simplistic, and the rhyme here occurs in the word “found,” which Yeats uses to describe the acquisition of sleep in both the child and Paris. Yeats’s word choice here ties the feeling of desire to a primal sense of discovery that recalls a childlike wonder. We thus discern a parallel between the child and Paris in their mutual desire for sleep, a symbol for peace and stability, and in the innocence that defines this sort of sleep. Paris, furthermore, seeks refuge in “Helen’s arms,” a description that equates Helen with a maternal figure and further strengthens the parallel between the child and Paris. Thus desire, in its association with a sleeping child, becomes an emblem of innocence rather than a force of destruction. 

Desire thus, according to Yeats, is powerful enough to stave off the chaos that ensues in the following lines—it is a force of stability. We might assume from a preliminary reading that the “world’s alarms” (most likely the onset of the Trojan War), should disrupt Paris’ peace, yet Paris slumbers on regardless, and rest becomes his ultimate source of satisfaction; the continuing enjambment from the third to the sixth lines, for instance, highlights his urgency to reach repose in Helen’s arms. The Trojan War no longer matters to Paris—his desire for Helen allows him to block out the surrounding disaster. Paris’s world thus becomes dreamlike and blissful: although Yeats may be giving Paris a literal golden bed to lie upon to symbolize luxury, we may interpret the golden bed metaphorically as the epitome of desire and happiness. In contrast to the destruction of the war outside, Paris and Helen enjoy a stable love. Even just a moment of desire, the “first dawn,” is enough for Paris to disregard the world around him. He concentrates solely on the bliss of his experience, his desire for sleep in Helen’s arms. 

Sleep then becomes the ultimate source of satisfaction for Paris, and because the first two lines of the poem set up sleep in relation to a child, we can imagine Paris as an innocent child when he is with Helen rather than a character who has violated the peace both of the woman he seizes and the world around him. We find, therefore, that Yeats represents Paris’s sexual desire as stable and peaceful rather than as destructive and violent. 

As we transition to the second stanza, we find this theme of peaceful sleep reemerging in a similar mythological tale—the tale of Tristram. This is, of course, the story of Tristan and Isolde—the same medieval legend that Richard Wagner adapts in his opera Tristan und Isolde. In the myth, the knight Tristan, after having slain Isode’s betrothed, King Mark, captures Isolde and carries her off with him. In this way, the Tristan story parallels the story of Paris and Helen, in that both men carry off their lovers against their will. Along the way, however, Tristan and Isolde both take a love potion and fall for each other—albeit unnaturally (if you’re interested in learning more about this, you can check out my analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land here—a poem that quotes from Wagner’s opera and uses the backdrop of the Tristan myth to establish a deeper layer of meaning). 

Yeats, on the other hand, again turns this unnatural and forced love into a more natural state of affairs: the ensuing imagery is as natural as it gets. We have roes and does and oaks and boughs; the repetition and rhymes here resemble that of a nursery rhyme, once again recalling our sleeping child from the poem’s opening stanza. In crafting this stanza, Yeats seems to be suggesting that Tristan’s conquest of Isolde is indeed natural. 

Finally, sleep finds Leda, who finds peace as a swan on the bank of the river Eurotas—once again, Yeats invokes naturalistic imagery to emphasize the calmness, serenity, and ease with which these lovers find peace. The holy bird (Jupiter) having accomplished his “predestined will” (which we may assume to be the rape of Leda), sinks from Leda’s body but not from her care, returning us to the image of the mother and the serenity that comes from a mother’s love. Leda, as a swan and mother, seems at peace. She is sleeping. She is sound.

Does Yeats, then, suggest that love restores peace, lulling lovers off to sleep? Without the mythological backdrop, that would seem to be the most accurate conclusion of this poem. If I had not told you that the three myths mentioned here—Paris and Helen, Tristan and Isolde, and Jupiter and Leda—were all myths concerning rape, perhaps we could then read Yeats’ poem as such. Yet it is no accident that Yeats singles out three mythological stories that concern the mistreatment of women. Does Yeats, then, consciously turn these tales on their head to present a peaceful alternative to sexual violence, or does he intend to leave us with an ironic commentary on the injustices that these women have been subjected to as the rest of the world turns a blind eye to their suffering—as the men in this poem go off to sleep peacefully amidst their suffering? A grimmer read might suggest the latter, but I’d like to stay optimistic—in pointing out these misdemeanors, perhaps Yeats suggests that we might move towards a more peaceful future in which male love might turn more gentle.