William Butler Yeats’s “September 1913” is one of his best and most anthologized political poems. The poem’s title was originally “Romance in Ireland (On reading much of the correspondence against the Art Gallery).” Its present title appeared in his collection Responsibilities 1914. Knowing the social context of Ireland at the time of the poem’s composition deepens the reader’s understanding and appreciation of this great poem. For five years prior to the poem, the Irish art dealer Hugh Lane offered to bequeath paintings he had acquired during his years as a collector to the city of Dublin. His only condition was that the Dublin Corporation provide funds to build a municipal art gallery to house the works. These paintings would include works by Corot, Manet, Degas and Renoir. During five years of negotiation between Lane and the Corporation, William Martin Murphy, a railroad magnet and publisher of the Irish Independent, vehemently opposed funding for the gallery. His newspaper published dozens of letters from middle- and upper-class Dubliners who also objected to the gallery, but not because of the money it would require constructing it. Rather, many of them claimed that the art intended for the gallery was vulgar and violated Catholic morals. Arguing in favor of the proposed gallery, Yeats initially wrote a poem explicitly about the controversy, “To a Wealthy Man who promised a second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were proved the People wanted Pictures,” which lambasts the shallow middle- and upper-class attitudes toward art. In “September 1913,” Yeats not only exposes the middle- and upper-classes as philistines who value materialism above all else; he also grieves for a heroic, “romantic” Ireland he believed existed in the past but now is “dead.” The poem is composed as a ballad, with a refrain closing each stanza with a reference to John O’Leary, (1830-1907). O’Leary was an Irish patriot who was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He agitated for Irish Home Rule in the 19th century and was arrested for treason and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. He served five years then was exiled for the remainder of his sentence.
September 1913 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; 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, The 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? It's with O'Leary in the grave. Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wings upon every tide; For this that all the blood was shed, For this Edward Fitgerald 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 were In all their loneliness and pain, You'd cry, "Some woman's yellow hair Had 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.
In the first stanza, Yeats scorns his countrymen who are only interested in adding their “halfpence to the pence” and timidly saying their prayers. Ireland no longer produces men who possess the noble and heroic qualities of the past. Men like O’Leary who sacrificed their liberty or life in the struggle to free Ireland from British rule. Stanza 2 alludes to the men of the past, “names that stilled your childish play,” who without reservation gave themselves to the “hangman’s rope.” Stanza 3 identifies noble men of the past, Fitzgerald, Tone, and Emmet who died fighting for Ireland against England’s oppressive rule.
Yeats’s contempt for the shallow materialism and religious hypocrisy of his Irish countrymen is easy to understand and justify. No doubt, there was much of both circulating among the citizens of Dublin when he wrote the poem. Yeats seems to have been unaware in this poem that in Dublin at the time was also a nobility and bravery that was growing and would surface in the Easter rebellion of 1916. That week-long hopeless but valiant uprising would reverse Yeats’s thinking and inspire his other great poem about what the Irish were capable of.