A Dialogue of Self and Soul Full Poem

A Dialogue of Self and Soul Full Poem is a notable literary work by Wole Soyinka. A complete discussion of this literary work is given, which will help you enhance your literary skills and prepare for the exam. Read the Main texts, Key info, Summary, Themes, Characters, Literary devices, Quotations, Notes, to various questions of A Dialogue of Self and Soul Full Poem.

Main text

I

My Soul. I summon to the winding ancient stair;

   Set all your mind upon the steep ascent,

   Upon the broken, crumbling battlement,

   Upon the breathless starlit air,

   Upon the star that marks the hidden pole;

   Fix every wandering thought upon

   That quarter where all thought is done:

   Who can distinguish darkness from the soul?

My Self. The consecrated blade upon my knees

   Is Sato’s ancient blade, still as it was,

   Still razor-keen, still like a looking-glass

   Unspotted by the centuries;

   That flowering, silken, old embroidery, torn

   From some court-lady’s dress and round

   The wooden scabbard bound and wound,

   Can, tattered, still protect, faded adorn.

My Soul. Why should the imagination of a man

   Long past his prime remember things that are

   Emblematical of love and war?

   Think of ancestral night that can,

   If but imagination scorn the earth

   And intellect its wandering

   To this and that and t’other thing,

   Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

My Self. Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it

   Five hundred years ago, about it lie

   Flowers from I know not what embroidery—

   Heart’s purple—and all these I set

   For emblems of the day against the tower

   Emblematical of the night,

   And claim as by a soldier’s right

   A charter to commit the crime once more.

My Soul. Such fullness in that quarter overflows

   And falls into the basin of the mind

   That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,

   For intellect no longer knows

   Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known—

   That is to say, ascends to Heaven;

   Only the dead can be forgiven;

   But when I think of that my tongue’s a stone.

II

My Self. A living man is blind and drinks his drop.

What matter if the ditches are impure?

What matter if I live it all once more?

Endure that toil of growing up;

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

Of boyhood changing into man;

The unfinished man and his pain

Brought face to face with his own clumsiness;

The finished man among his enemies?—

How in the name of Heaven can he escape

That defiling and disfigured shape

The mirror of malicious eyes

Casts upon his eyes until at last

He thinks that shape must be his shape?

And what’s the good of an escape

If honour find him in the wintry blast?

I am content to live it all again

And yet again, if it be life to pitch

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,

A blind man battering blind men;

Or into that most fecund ditch of all,

The folly that man does

Or must suffer, if he woos

A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.

W. B. Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed © 1961 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with the permission of A. P. Watt, Ltd. on behalf of Michael Yeats.

Source: The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (1989)