William Butler Yeats' poem, “The Indian Upon God” consists of ten rimed couplets. The theme of the poem dramatizes the biblical concept that God made man in His own image: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:27)
The Moorfowl
The speaker of the poem locates himself along “the water’s edge below the humid trees.” He is in a meditative mood and reports that his “spirit rocked in the evening light.” He notices some birds pacing about and begins to muse and consider how the moorfowl would explain his existence if he could talk. He watches the birds as they are leisurely “pac[ing] / All dripping on a grassy slope.”
Then they stop and the oldest bird begins to speak: “Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak / Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky. / The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye.”
The moorfowl envisions his creator as a more exalted version of himself. His Creator has a “bill” and a “wing,” and the rains drip from His wings, while the moonbeams shoot from His eye.
The Lotus
The speaker then moves on a little ways and overhears a “lotus talk.” The lotus also happens to be holding forth about his Creator: “Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,
For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide / Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.” The lotus also describes his Creator as an embellished version of himself. His Creator “hangeth on a stalk,” just as he does, and He also causes the rail to fall. But unlike the moorfowl’s concept that the rain drips from the Supreme Moorfowl’s wings, the lotus’s Creator lets the rain “slide” between His petals.
The Roebuck
The speaker then moves on and sees and roebuck who “raised his eyes / Brimful of starlight.” He then hears the roebuck describe his own maker: “He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He / Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me?” The roebuck reasons that his Creator has to be like himself in order to have been able to fashion his unique characteristics of sadness, softness, and gentleness.
The Peacock
The speaker continues to move along and overhears a “peacock say”: “Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay, / He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night / His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.” Again, the animal describes his Creator in terms of his own characteristics.
The peacock, however, is a bit more arrogant with his description by claiming that the “monstrous peacock,” or more glorious version of himself, also made grass and worms. The peacock implies that his Creator has made these creatures for the sake of the peacock. And the peacock also likens his beautiful tail feathers to stars hanging in the skies.
Commentary
The philosophy dramatized in Yeats’ poem is pantheism, the concept that God is everything. If man rightly discerns that God created human beings in His image, then God, in fact, created everything else that exists in His image. If all things are reflections of one Creator, then each thing created can rightly aver that it is made in the image of the Divine.
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