A New Solomon and Sheba Poem

Abstract

This half-rueful, half-tormented address to an enigmatic “beauty”, left untitled and unpublished, survives in a single fair copy in Yeats’s hand, reproduced above with his light revisions and idiosyncratic spellings of “wrist” and “scholar” (readers are invited to judge whether “prey” in line 13 is a misspelling, and to guess where the closing double quotes were supposed to open). The fair copy is inscribed on the two inside pages of a loose bifolium, now among drafts for poems collected in The Wild Swans at Coole in the National Library of Ireland: Ms. 13,587(4). At the end of the poem Yeats wrote “T.O.”, apparently pointing to an early version of “The Living Beauty” on the back page of the bifolium. This version, partly obscured by an ink blot, begins: