Our favourite WB Yeats poem: Diarmaid Ferriter and Fiach Mac Conghail on 'September 1913'

Why Diarmaid Ferriter chose this poem

Yeats’s love for Maud Gonne and his introduction to the veteran Fenian John O’Leary in the early 20th century led to him moving in republican circles, but he grew tired of what he regarded as the pieties, hypocrisies and snobberies of the Catholic middle class, most memorably in this poem, written to commemorate the date when Dublin Corporation rejected the proposed Hugh Lane art gallery. This was also Yeats as public commentator, and as a poet keen to fan the flames of controversy. The poem was published in The Irish Times in 1913 (as Romance in Ireland). It is not a sophisticated poem, but the simple structure, strong rhyme and repetition powerfully conveyed his sarcasm, anger and political message. The words “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” continued to resonate long afterwards for those preoccupied with the themes of class, religion, societal values and the status of the arts in Ireland.

Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin

Why Fiach Mac Conghail chose this poem

I admire Yeats’s courage as an artist to engage with the politics of the day. He didn’t pull his punches in his criticism of materialism taking over from a sense of community in Ireland. This poem could have been written about the Celtic Tiger era. It was the reason why we included this poem as a part of our production of The Risen People at the Abbey Theatre recently. It is a reminder to us all about how we should constantly strive for our vision of a more equal society and not to succumb to the “greasy till”.

Senator Fiach Mac Conghail is director of the Abbey Theatre

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,

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 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.

But let them be, they’re dead and gone,

They’re with O’Leary in the grave.