Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

SEPTEMBER 1913

FORM AND
STRUCTURE

-

CONTEXT

-

-

-

THEMES

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

Oratory poem
Ballad, has a clear chorus, which is a popular form in Irish culture
Simple ABAB rhyme scheme/alternate rhyming couplets, as sometimes simple
structures and strong rhyme carry political messages better
Verse 1, 4 beat rhythm shows anger
First 6 lines = rhetorical question w/out question mark, its contemptuous

O’Leary died 1907, he was a romantic hero representing liberation + freedom of
spirit
3 characters mentioned in third verse were all protestant
Sep 1913 = Ireland general strike for transport and general workers union, 25,000
men on strike demonstrating against low wages, high rent and for better working
conditions
Church wanted to take away strikers children and put them in convents, so poem is
quite anti- religion as Yeats was against catholic intervention + believed catholic
church was obsessed with its own power
Poem compares new revolutionaries against old heroes eg
...
Diphthongs and
vowel sounds, gliding vowels
- Dead and gone = monosyllabic to
reinforce his point
‘They have gone about the world like wind’
- Simile, elemental force that can be
invigorating or insubstantial, there’s a
transience to it
‘For whom the hangman’s rope was spun’

-

-

OTHER POEMS

Reference to the Irish Catholic
soldiers who went abroad
because weren’t allowed to be
catholic soldiers in Ireland
Birds symbolise freedom

-

Spun = idea of people in Ireland held
together
- Hangman = child’s game that is now
reality for the heroes
‘Was it for this the wild geese spread… For this
that all the blood was shed,’
- Irish folk tale about girls whose
brothers were turned to geese and
flew away – death and loss
‘And call those exiles as they were In all their
loneliness and pain, You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s
yellow hair’
- Tradition in Ireland of idealizing these
people as heroes but Yeats sees the
pain and loneliness
- Fionnuala, an Irish Goddess, idea that
romantic love/goddess or principle of
Irish Nationalism inspires them
- Were and hair = para rhyme, so close
to the ideal,
uncomfortable/hopelessness

‘The names that stilled your childish play,’
Link to Among School Children: children are
responsive to heroes when they act out adult/
fantasy roles
‘All that delirium of the brave?’
Link to Easter 1916: ‘what excess of love
bewildered them,’ They are bewildered by
their love + delirium can be a disordered state,
the three heroes represented disorder to the
status-quo



---