Beautiful Lofty Things
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1938. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2034, and this site is served partly from American servers. So for now we give the notes without the full text; it will appear here in 2034.
It begins: Beautiful lofty things: O'Leary's noble head
In brief
SummaryYeats recalls five moments of nobility from people he knew.
A roll-call of remembered moments, each a picture of nobility. John O'Leary's noble head. Yeats's father on the Abbey stage facing a raging crowd, praising Ireland as a land of saints, then, when the applause died, finishing with "plaster Saints". The historian Standish O'Grady propping himself between tables to make a lofty, half-nonsensical speech to a drunken audience. Lady Gregory, nearly eighty, calmly telling of a man who threatened her life, and how she sat every evening at her table with the blinds up. Maud Gonne waiting for a train at Howth, as upright and proud as the goddess Athene. The poem closes by calling them all Olympians, gods of a kind never seen again.
Lines to remember
Beautiful lofty things: O'Leary's noble head;
All the Olympians; a thing never known again.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4O'Leary and my father
The opening phrase works as a heading for a list. First comes the noble head of John O'Leary, the old Fenian. Then Yeats's father on the Abbey stage before a raging crowd: he began what sounded like praise of Ireland as a land of saints, waited for the applause to die, then added "Of plaster Saints", head thrown back in mischief.
Lines 5 to 6Standish O'Grady
Standish O'Grady, the historian whose retellings of the old Irish sagas inspired the Revival, is seen holding himself up between the tables at a dinner, speaking high, nonsensical words to a drunken audience. Even his unsteadiness has a kind of grandeur.
Lines 7 to 9Lady Gregory's table
Augusta Gregory sits at her great gilded table, approaching her eightieth winter. She reports, quite calmly, that a man threatened her life the day before, and that she told him she sat at that very table every evening from six to seven.
Lines 10 to 12Pallas Athene
Her speech ends with the blinds drawn up: she would not hide. Then Maud Gonne waits for a train at Howth station, as straight-backed and proud as Pallas Athene. The last line gathers them all as Olympians, gods of Greek myth, and declares that such people will never be known again.
Themes
Heroic memory
Each figure is caught in a single remembered moment, like a photograph or a statue. Yeats does not tell their life stories; he picks a gesture, a head, a posture. Memory turns ordinary scenes, a debate, a dinner, a railway platform, into images of greatness, and the poem itself becomes a gallery of his heroes.
Courage and dignity
What the portraits share is bearing under pressure. His father faces a hostile crowd with mischief, Lady Gregory meets a death threat by sitting where she can be seen, and Maud Gonne stands with a straight back and "arrogant head". Nobility here is a matter of style and nerve, not rank.
The end of an era
The final judgement, that these were Olympians "never known again", is a lament as well as a tribute. By the time Yeats wrote, most of them were dead. The poem suggests that the heroic generation of the Irish Revival has passed, and that the present has nothing to match it.
Context
The poem was first published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, 1938). Yeats was in his seventies, and all but one of the people in it were dead: O'Leary in 1907, O'Grady in 1928, his father in 1922 and Lady Gregory in 1932. Only Maud Gonne was still living, in Dublin.
The scene with John Butler Yeats took place at the Abbey Theatre in 1907, at the public debate held after the riots over Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, where he mocked the pious idea of Ireland as a land of saints. O'Leary, the Fenian leader, had been Yeats's political mentor, and O'Grady's histories of Ireland's heroic age were a founding text of the Literary Revival.
Form
Twelve long lines of varying length in a single block, mostly unrhymed and built as a list joined by semicolons. There are no stanza breaks, so one portrait runs into the next, sometimes in mid-line. The loose, conversational lines let each memory stand as a snapshot, and the short summing-up of the last line gathers them into one company.
