Check this one out:
The Peacock
What's riches to him
That has made a great peacock
With the pride of his eye?
The wind-beaten, stone-grey,
And desolate Three Rock
Would nourish his whim.
Live he or die
Amid wet rocks and heather,
His ghost will be gay
Adding feather to feather
For the pride of his eye.This poem elaborates on the themes of Pride as craziness, and Reality as something which might be good to forget about.
It’s the second of a pair of poems. The first is called The Witch and is basically a finger-wagging about the folly of building your life around trying to get rich. Nothing groundbreaking there. But it’s still a Yeats poem, and so it’s still cool. (There’s a song-rendition of this poem on podcast episode 4, New People.)
The Witch
Toil and grow rich,
What's that but to lie
With a foul witch
And after, drained dry,
To be brought
To the chamber where
Lies one long sought
With despair? What The Witch does is give us something to compare with The Peacock, the second of the pair. According to The Witch, living for money is folly. You’ll regret it. By contrast, to the guy in The Peacock, money and all other material things are meaningless. He lives in a world that is cold, hard, and empty. It matters not. His ego has become completely untethered from external realities. He’s got one thing on his mind: adding to a giant, feathery monument to his pride.
What would the Soul from Vacillation VII say? Leave your pride and humble yourself before the bleakness of your reality? No way. So, is his pride a kind of enlightenment? I don’t think so. What about the moon from He and She? By being pride crazy is he just being a more perfect version of himself? I don’t think so. It’s pretty clear that he’s broken. But there’s just something about The Peacock that seems unresolvable. I don’t know what to make of it! We’re just four poems in, and the metaphorical axes are already curling over on themselves!
The song: