Analysis of September 1913
William Butler Yeats 1865 (Sandymount) – 1939 (Menton)
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.
Scheme | ababcdED fgfghdED ijijcdED xxxxhded |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 11110111 11000101 0101101 011100101 111010101 11011101 01010101 11010001 110101001 01111101 111010111 11011111 1101111 01111111 01010101 11010001 11110111 011011001 11111111 11100101 01010011 110100101 01010101 11010001 11110101 0111110 01110001 11110101 11100101 11110111 11111101 11010001 |
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,115 |
Words | 212 |
Sentences | 9 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8 |
Lines Amount | 32 |
Letters per line (avg) | 28 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 220 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 53 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on May 02, 2023
- 1:08 min read
- 99 Views
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"September 1913" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/39423/september-1913>.
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