| What need you, being come to sense, | |
| But fumble in a greasy till | |
| And add the halfpence to the pence | |
| And prayer to shivering prayer, until | |
| You have dried the marrow from the bone; | 5 |
| For men were born to pray and save; | |
| Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, | |
| It’s with O’Leary in the grave. | |
| Yet they were of a different kind, | |
| The names that stilled your childish play, | 10 |
| They have gone about the world like wind, | |
| But little time had they to pray | |
| For whom the hangman’s rope was spun, | |
| And what, God help us, could they save? | |
| Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, | 15 |
| It’s with O’Leary in the grave. | |
| Was it for this the wild geese spread | |
| The grey wing upon every tide; | |
| For this that all that blood was shed, | |
| For this Edward Fitzgerald died, | 20 |
| And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, | |
| All that delirium of the brave? | |
| Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, | |
| It’s with O’Leary in the grave. | |
| Yet could we turn the years again, | 25 |
| And call those exiles as they were | |
| In all their loneliness and pain, | |
| You’d cry ‘Some woman’s yellow hair | |
| Has maddened every mother’s son’: | |
| They weighed so lightly what they gave. | 30 |
| But let them be, they’re dead and gone, | |
| They’re with O’Leary in the grave. | |
| September, 1913 — The date is significant. Yeats wrote this poem shortly after the beginning of an event now known as the Dublin Lock-Out (26 August 1913 to 18 January 1914). The conditions of the working poor in Ireland at the time were horrific. They lived in overcrowded tenements, and their infant mortality (deaths of infants in the first year) approached 15%. Workers attempted to form trade unions. In response, employers locked them out of their jobs. In addition, the Catholic Church (which was immensely powerful in Ireland) sided with the employers and blocked a relief mission called the Kiddies’ Scheme, in which children of locked-out Irish workers (who, of course, were not being paid) would temporarily live with families of unionized workers in England. Church leaders said that Irish children would be exposed to Protestant ideas if that happened, so in effect they were arguing that it was better for them to die of starvation and lack of medical care than be exposed to non-Catholic theology. | |
| What need you — What do you need to do. By saying you, Yeats is addressing both the Irish bourgeoisie and Catholic officials. | |
| But — Except | |
| save — punning on save in both an economic and a spiritual sense | |
| O’Leary — John O’Leary (1830-1907) was an Irish revolutionary leader and member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (which later gave birth to the Irish Republican Army), although he favored a constitutional monarchy for Ireland rather than a republic. Arrested for treason against the United Kingdom in 1865 (the year Yeats was born), he was imprisoned until 1871 before being exiled. He returned to Ireland in 1885 and remained a respected figure in the separatist movement until his death. Yeats knew him well and admired him, though they did not agree about everything. Unlike Yeats, he believed that military force would be necessary to win Irish freedom, though (like Yeats) he opposed terrorism. Like Yeats, he believed in secular government, in other words that the church should stay out of politics. Most importantly, O’Leary encouraged Yeats to unite the principles of the English Romantic poets (especially Percy Shelley and William Blake) with the goals of Irish nationalism, thus the reference to “Romantic Ireland.” | |
| wild geese — a term for Irish separatists who were forced to leave Ireland but continued to support the cause from abroad. Originally, the term was used for Irishmen who became mercenaries in Europe, but Yeats is using it in its later sense. | |
| Fitzgerald — Lord Edward FitzGerald (1763-1798) was a member of the Irish nobility. Although he fought for the United Kingdom against the American colonies in the American War for Independence, he became a supporter of the French Revolution and of the ideas of Thomas Paine, the political essayist sometimes called the “Father of the American Revolution.” At that point, he repudiated his own hereditary titles. He then traveled abroad to attempt to get foreign support for an armed insurrection in Ireland. The British government learned of his attempts and tried to get him to accept exile because it did not want to arrest someone of his class. He refused. Soon afterwards, the British imposed martial law on Ireland and brutally repressed the insurrection. FitzGerald went into hiding, but his location was revealed by an informant. When officials went to arrest him, he fought (killing one man) until he was shot in the shoulder and taken to prison where, denied any medical treatment, he died of infection. | |
| Robert Emmet — Emmet (1778-1803) was an Anglo-Irishman (meaning that, like Yeats, he was descended from the Protestant English who controlled Ireland) supporter of Irish independence. Like many Irish leaders, including FitzGerald and Tone, he attempted to get foreign support for Irish rebellion. He manufactured weapons and explosives, and then led an uprising in Dublin on 23 July 1803. Supposedly, though, when he saw a man pulled from a horse and stabbed to death by the mob, he unsuccessfully tried to call it off. He went into hiding but was arrested for treason when he tried to visit his fiancée before leaving the country. The trial was far from fair (the British bribed his main defense attorney and tried to bribe his assistant, who refused to comply). Once convicted, Emmet delivered a speech that inspired future Irish separatists for generations. Then he was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, though he was actually just hanged and then beheaded. He was the last person to receive that sentence in an English court. | |
| Wolfe Tone — Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) was another Anglo-Irishman and the first leader of the Society of United Irishman, a political organization advocating for Irish independence and influenced by the writings of Thomas Paine. When the organization was outlawed in 1793 because it supported the French Revolution and the French had just declared war on the United Kingdom, it went underground and continued to grow. In 1798, it initiated a rebellion, but it lacked military organization and instead of battles against the English army, some followers used the rebellion as a pretext for slaughtering Protestants loyal to England. The French sent approximately 1000 soldiers, but they were not enough to affect the outcome. Tone then joined a force of 3000 more French soldiers who attempted to cross to Ireland by ship. They were intercepted and defeated by British naval ships and Tone was captured. When he was denied his request for a soldier’s execution by firing squad, he slit his own throat rather than being hanged as a traitor. | |
Some woman’s — Here, Yeats invokes the image of Kathleen ni Houlihan, a mythical figure in Irish culture. In his play Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Yeats depicts her as an old woman who arrives at the door of an Irish family as one of its sons is about to get married. She describes the lands that have been taken from her as four fields (representing the four regions of Ireland) and says she needs a blood sacrifice to get them back. The son agrees and goes off with her, she becomes a young queen, and in the final lines of the play, promises that the young men who die for her will achieve immortal fame:
That the “you” in the poem calls Kathleen just “Some woman” reflects how clueless about and dismissive of the cause of Irish independence Yeats believes the bourgeoisie and Catholic Church are. |
|
| yellow hair — Kathleen Ni Houlihan was traditionally depicted as blonde. The phrase yellow hair again shows how disrespectful Yeats imagines the poem’s targets to be. | |