"Ire"land

I'll admit, I didn't "get" September 1913 by Yeats when I first read it. I was thinking back on how we were supposed to compare it to religiously based poems and I was expecting God to be a part of it! Imagine my surprise when this poem was talking about Ireland! It took several readings to start understanding this poem more, though I admit! some of it still escapes me.

As much as I can figure, this poem is about the poor working class in Ireland and their struggle against the rich business owners. It seems, by talking of old Irish revolutionaries, Yeats wants Ireland to revolt and find similar leaders.

There are several things that caught my interest in the poem. The first thing was based on the line, "But fumble in a greasy till." I looked up the word "till," and found that it means something like a cash register. So him saying it's greasy first reminded me of how we refer to businessmen as "greasy," and an image of a fat man with greased hair and moustache came to mind. Then I wondered why it was the till that was greasy, and I think it means that they had to grease it to keep it opening and closing. So it's so full it's getting stuck? This was a great way to say that they're beyond rich. And the fact that they only "add the halfpence to the pence" shows how greedy they are, as well. I looked up exactly who these greasy men would've been at this time and apparently they were mostly business-minded Catholics. This makes the line, "For men were born to pray and save" have two meanings. They are supposed to save their fellow man, but what they are actually saving is their own life-saving life-savings.

After this we're given an ambiguous "they" whose names hold weight, were spread like the wind, didn't bother praying, and were killed for what they did. In the next line we are thrown the names of several revolutionaries. I went to gather info on each of them and all had been members of a revolutionary group formed around the French Revolution: The Society of United Irishmen. This group hoped to release Ireland from British rule. This is interesting, since this is what the Irish are hoping to do at this point of time. Each one of these men was killed for the cause, and each one of them were leaders.

In the last stanza we're given a hypothetical situation where all these suffering revolutionaries are called back to life. The people react by yelling out they're problems, but not by seeing the sacrifices of those men. This saddens the poet as he then suggests that by rejecting the ideals of the old, we are killing the romance of Ireland and forgetting the length of this struggle, "But let them be, they're dead and gone, / They're with O'Leary in the grave."

So then, this poem is a call for action to the Irishmen of today, asking, "what of the old sacrifices in this battle? do you forget their struggles?" By doing this he means to call that the Ireland of 1913 remembers the length of battle, the people of the past standing by them, and that men of such caliber must be found today! Such a poem must of been heartening, despite its pessimism, back at this time.





http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wbyeats/bl-wbye-sept.htm