Poem of the Day: ‘September 1913’

There are so many different faces of William Butler Yeats, from the young Irish pre-Raphaelite phenomenon of “Down by the Salley Gardens” to the self-aware old man of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” And each of them was overconfident and overwise. Each of them was also perfect. What the Sun’s week of Yeats teaches us is that, in every stage, he had an infallible gift of wordsmithery — an almost impossible touch at creating the perfect line. The Political Yeats is another of his personae, adopted in mid-life anger at the public scene in Ireland, and a potent example is “September 1913,” which mourns — or mocks more than mourns — in its refrain: Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave. Yeats slowly came to understand the Irish revolt against England would result in violence, and in “September 1913” he uses four eight-line tetrameter stanzas, rhymed ababcdcd, to sneer that none of the leading figures of Irish freedom in 1913 had the courage or the lack of self-interest of such former Fenians as the 19th-century John O’Leary.September 1913by William Butler YeatsWhat 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; 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, 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, 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, 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, And call those exiles as they wereIn 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. But let them be, they’re dead and gone, They’re with O’Leary in the grave.___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘September 1913’

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