Yeats wrote "September 1913" in response to two events in Dublin - Sir Hugh Lane's offer of his art collection to the city and the 1913 Dublin Lock-out strike. The poem laments how "Romantic Ireland" embodied by patriots like O'Leary who fought for Irish independence is now "dead and gone." Yeats suggests Ireland has lost its visionary spirit and instead focuses on practical concerns of "fumbling in a greasy till."

1. September 1913
W.B. Yeats
Published in ‘Responsibilities’ (1914)

2. Historical Context 1
Yeats wrote several poems in response to the
public controversy stirred by Sir Hugh Lane's
offer of his collection of paintings to the city of
Dublin and the Dublin Lock-out of 1913-14.
Of these ‘September 1913’ is the best known
and the most significant.
Sir Hugh Lane was a friend of Yeats’s and
related to Lady Gregory, one of his patrons.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir,
Les Parapluies,
1883.

3. Historical Context 2
The Dublin Lock-out was a major industrial dispute between
approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers which took
place in Ireland's capital city. The dispute lasted from 26 August
1913 to 18 January 1914, and is often viewed as the most severe
and significant industrial dispute in Irish history. Central to the
dispute was the workers' right to unionise.
One of the major factors which contributed to the ignition of the
dispute was the dire circumstances in which the city's poor lived. In
1913, one third of Dublin's population lived in slums. The infant
mortality rate amongst the poor was 142 per 1000 births (in 2005
it was 6 per 1000). The situation was made worse by the high rate
Q. What do these of disease in the slums, which was the result of a lack of health
notes suggest care and cramped living conditions. The most prevalent disease
about the likely was tuberculosis (TB), which spread through tenements quickly
tone of the and caused many deaths. A report published in 1912 claimed that
poem? TB-related deaths in Ireland were 50% higher than in England or
Scotland, and the vast majority of TB-related deaths in Ireland
occurred amongst the poor.
Source; Wikipedia.

4. 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; 5
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, 10
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, 15
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

5. 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, 20
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, 25
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, 30
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave

6. Q. Close textual analysis: FORM – STRUCTURE – LANGUAGE.
What was the ‘form’ of ‘The Stolen Child’? What ‘form’ does this poem take? How
might it be significant?
Work out the rhythm, metre and rhyme scheme – make a note of the structure of the
poem. How does the structure help shape our response?
Look at Yeats’s use of language. How do the various techniques help shape our
response to the poem?
What connections can you make between the poems you’ve studied so far?

7. Connections – Still in a Celtic Twilight?
If ‘The Stolen Child’ looked into Ireland’s
magical past what does ‘September
1913’ directly refer to?
To what extent does ‘September 1913’
echo ‘the cry of the heart against
necessity’ - a poem about ‘longing and
complaint’?

8. Connections – Still in a Celtic Twilight?
WARNING – MAUDLIN IRISH BALLAD ALERT
Be aware that the songs you are about to listen to may remind you of ‘the auld country’. If taken with either a
glass ‘o’the black stuff’ or whiskey (note the correct spelling) they may induce tears, staring fondly into the
middle distance or dreams of rolling green mountains, leafy forest glades and rain. Lots of rain.
Listen to the song ‘By Memory Inspired’ based on an Anonymous poem first published
by Yeats’s publishers the Cuala Press in 1907 and read the note on the next slide.
How does this help us understand the poem ‘September 1913’?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=srAv8S3ywzs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7MAxced0Uw&feature=related

9. Yeats and the Ballad
In a letter to his friend Lady Dorothy Wellesley during the period when
Yeats was writing the ballads of Last Poems (1938) at the end of his life
Yeats insisted that rhyme was crucial to capturing the authentic:
‘folk lilt of the Irish accent…Look through any old book of ballads and you
will find that they have all perfectly regular rhyme schemes…Regular
rhyme is needed in this kind of work…The swing of the sentence makes
the reader expect it…The fundamental sing-song.’
Letters on Poetry from W.B. Yeats to Lady Dorothy Wellesley (1964)
Q. What do the biographies of the ‘Romantic’ Irish patriots mentioned in the poem add
to our understanding of the poem?

10. John O'Leary converted Yeats to the cause of Irish cultural
nationalism and was, in fact, responsible for Yeats
becoming an ‘Irish’ writer. A man of great moral
rectitude, a vehement patriot and active Fenian, he
suffered long years of prison and exile in behalf of an
ideal, if somewhat imaginary, Ireland. To Yeats, he
seemed the embodiment of the romantic conception of
Ireland and of Irish nationalism. O'Leary recommended to
Yeats the writings of the Young Irelanders (rebels from
the mid-19th century), maintaining that the nature and
intensity of the feeling they had inspired had been of
great political value. However, he never claimed that they
were noteworthy for quality. In fact, despite his stress on
the importance of a nationalistic purpose to aspiring Irish
writers, O'Leary insisted that poetics should never be
sacrificed to politics, nor aesthetics to argument. In his
essay ‘Poetry and Tradition’ (1907) Yeats recalls O'Leary
insisting that a ‘writer must not write badly, or ignore the
examples of the great Masters in the fancied or real
service of a cause, ... [just as] he must not lie for it or
grow hysterical". Hoping to promote an Irish literature of
the greatest kind, he supported Yeats in his refusal to
praise second-rate literature in order to strengthen the
cause of Irish nationalism. Thus Yeats associated O'Leary
not only with Irish cultural nationalism but with an
insistence on the highest standards of artistic excellence.
Yeats had faith that O'Leary, like himself, would have
recognized the intrinsic quality of the Lane Collection and
John O’Leary (1830-1907) deplored the nationalism which led to its loss.

11. Irish aristocrat and revolutionary.
He was the fifth son of the 1st
Duke of Leinster. He died of
wounds received in resisting arrest
on charge of treason following the
1798 rebellion.
Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1763 – 1798)

12. Irish nationalist and Republican and rebel
leader born in Dublin, he led an abortive
rebellion against British rule in 1803 and was
captured, tried and executed by hanging,
drawing and quartering for high treason. His
last recorded words were made in a now
famous speech on the eve of his execution:
‘Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who
knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let
not prejudice or ignorance, asperse them. Let them
and me rest in obscurity and peace, and my tomb
remain uninscribed, and my memory in oblivion,
until other times and other men can do justice to
my character. When my country takes her place
among the nations of the earth, then and not till
then, let my epitaph be written. I have done.’
Robert Emmet (1778-1803)

13. Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763 – 1798), was a
leading Irish revolutionary figure and one of
the founding members of the United Irishmen
and is regarded as the father of Irish
Republicanism. He was captured by British
forces in Donegal and taken prisoner following
the 1798 rebellion. Before he was to be
executed, Wolfe Tone attempted suicide and
subsequently died from his wounds
Q. What do the biographies of the ‘Romantic’ Irish patriots mentioned in the poem add
to our understanding of the poem?

14. ‘In the thirty years or so during which I have been reading Irish newspapers, three public
controversies have stirred my imagination. The first was the Parnell controversy…another
was the dispute over The Playboy *of the Western World+…The third prepared for the
Corporation’s refusal of a building for Sir Hugh Lane’s famous collection of pictures …
These controversies, political, literary, and artistic, have showed that neither religion nor
politics can of itself create minds with enough receptivity to become wise, or just and
generous enough to make a nation … In Ireland I am constantly reminded of that fable of
the futility of all discipline that is not of the whole being…Against all this we have but a
few educated men and all the remnants of an old traditional culture among the poor. Both
were stronger forty years ago, before the rise of our new middle class which ... [shows]
how base, at moment of excitement, are minds without culture. ’
WB Yeats, Notes on second edition of ‘Responsibilities’ (1916)
‘Power passed to small shopkeepers, to clerks, to Q. What do these
that very class who had seemed to John O'Leary so extracts reveal of
ready to bend to the power of others, to men who Yeats’s attitude to
had risen above the traditions of the countryman, some of his fellow
without learning those of cultivated life, or even countrymen? How
educating themselves, and who because of their does this tally with
poverty, their ignorance, their superstitious piety, the opening stanza of
are much subject to all kinds of fear.’ the poem?
WB Yeats ‘Poetry and Tradition’ (1907).

15. Yeats and the creation of an Irish Literature
Q. What does the following extract reveal of Yeats’s thinking
about Ireland as a country? How does this tally with your reading
of ‘September 1913’?
‘You cannot keep the idea of a nation alive where there are no national
institutions to reverence, no national success to admire, without a model of it
in the mind of the people. You can call it ‘Caitlín Ní Uallacháin’ (the title of a
play Yeats wrote in 1902 – ‘Kathleen ni-Houlihan’) or ‘Sean-Bhean Bhocht’
(the poor old woman) in a mood of simple feeling and love that image, but for
the general purposes of life you must have a complex mass of images, making
up a model like an architect's model. The Young Ireland poets created this
with certain images rather simple in their conception that filled the mind of
the young-Wolfe Tone, King Brian, Emmet, Owen Roe, Sarsfield, the Fisherman
of Kinsale . . . its most powerful work was this creation of sensible images for
the affections vivid enough to follow men to the scaffold.’
WB Yeats, March 12, 1909

16. In May 1902, Yeats wrote of his play:
‘My subject is Ireland and its struggle for independence. The scene is laid in the West of
Ireland at the time of the French landing. I have described a household preparing for the
wedding of the son of the house. Everyone expects some good thing from the wedding.
The bridegroom is thinking of his bride, the father of the fortune which will make them all
more prosperous, and the mother of a plan of turning this prosperity to account by making
her youngest son a priest, and the youngest son of a greyhound pup the bride promised to
give him when she marries. Into this household comes Kathleen Ni Houlihan herself, and
the bridegroom leaves his bride, and all the hopes come to nothing. It is the perpetual
struggle of the cause of Ireland and every other ideal cause against private hopes and
dreams, against all that we mean when we say the world. I have put into the mouth of
Kathleen Ni Houlihan verses about those who have died or are about to die for her, and
these verses are the key of the rest. . . .’
Q. What has Kathleen come to symbolise? What does the
rejection of the Lane bequest or the Dublin Lock-out symbolise to
Yeats?

17. Yeats and the creation of an Irish Literature
In 1903 Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory (in a dedication of a volume of his plays to her),
‘One night I had a dream almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-
being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an
old woman in a long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Kathleen Ni Houlihan for whom so
many songs have been sung and about whom so many stories have been told and for
whose sake so many have gone to their death. I thought if I could write this out as a little
play I could make others see my dream as I had seen it, but I could not get down out of
that high window of dramatic verse, and in spite of all you had done for me I had not the
country speech. One has to live among the people . . . before one can think the thoughts of
the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my dream into the little play, `Kathleen
Ni Houlihan,' and when we gave it to the little theatre in Dublin (the Abbey theatre he co-
founded) and found that the working people liked it, you helped me to put my other
dramatic fables into speech . . . .’
Q. What does this dedication say about Yeats’s intentions with his
play and with his earlier intention to ‘write poetry of insight and
knowledge’?

18. Connections – Yeats’s Poetry
A Coat (1912)
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it, 5
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked. 10
Q. What connects the tone of ‘September 1913’ with ‘A Coat’? What coat is Yeats
beginning to divest himself of in this poem?

19. ‘O’Leary has influenced all I
‘…in dreams begin responsibility.’ have set my hand to since.’
Epigraph to the anthology ‘Responsibilities’ (1914)
WB Yeats
‘How am I fallen from myself, for a long time now
‘Responsibilities’ marked a
I have not seen the Prince of Chang in my dreams.’
turning point in Yeats’s Epigraph to the anthology ‘Responsibilities’ (1914)
poetic career as he
abandons ‘old mythologies’
not all mythologies, only old
ones.’ (Greening 2005) Yeats’s great poetry is ‘based upon antinomies - Ireland
and Byzantium, youth and age, fecund life and stylized
art, action and contemplation, love and war, violent
energy and decadent civilization - which gain definition
from one another without ever reaching, or seriously
seeking, reconciliation’.
Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (1986)
Q. Write a short paragraph explaining how each of these quotes relate (or doesn’t
relate) to your understanding of the poem ‘September 1913’.