Corpus of Electronic Texts Edition

Supernatural Songs (Author: William Butler Yeats)

part 2

Ribh denounces Patrick

1. An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man,
   A Trinity that is wholly masculine. Man, woman, child
   (daughter or son),
   That's how all natural or supernatural stories run.
2. 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.

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   p.285

   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 embraces twined.
3. 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.