In Tara's Halls
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1939. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2035, 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 2035.
It begins: A man I praise that once in Tara's Halls
In brief
SummaryA hundred-year-old man of ancient Tara calmly arranges his own death.
The poet praises a man from Ireland's heroic past. In the royal halls of Tara he tells a woman that his hundredth year is ending and that the adventure of old age is about to begin. He has given women everything they need but has never asked to be loved; to ask would make him old indeed. At the Sacred House he announces aloud that asking love in return, of God or of woman, would mean his time had come. At the end of his hundred and first year he has his grave and coffin made, gathers his family, lies down and stops his own breath.
Lines to remember
That the adventure of old age begins.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 5A man at Tara
The poet praises a man who once, in the halls of Tara, told a woman kneeling to him to lie still: his hundredth year was ending and he sensed that something was about to happen. The repeated "I think" gives him a quiet, level voice, as if old age were simply the next adventure.
Lines 6 to 10Never asking for love
He has given many women shelter, clothes, passion and perhaps love, but he has never asked to be loved. If he ever did, he says, he would be old indeed. Age here is not a number of years but the moment a man begins to need.
Lines 11 to 15At the Sacred House
He goes to a holy place, stands between a golden plough and harrow, and speaks so that attendants and passers-by can hear. He has loved God, he says, but to ask God or woman for love in return would be a sign that it was time to die.
Lines 16 to 20The chosen death
When his hundred and first year ends he sets diggers and carpenters to work, checks that the grave is deep and the coffin sound, calls together the generations of his house, lies down and stops his breath. The plain list of actions makes dying a task done well.
Themes
Old age
The man treats extreme age as an "adventure" rather than a decline. What would make him truly old is not his hundred years but neediness: asking to be loved. When he senses that moment, he meets it by choosing his own death. The poem admires a self-command that most people could never manage, and it sets that ideal beside the rage and restlessness of other late poems.
Giving and asking
He has given women "everything" they need, and he has loved God, but he refuses to ask for anything back. Love that is given freely keeps him strong; love that is demanded would bind him. The same rule covers God and women alike, which is what makes his public declaration at the Sacred House so striking.
Context
The poem was first published in Last Poems and Two Plays (Cuala Press, Dublin, July 1939), which appeared some months after Yeats's death in January 1939. Tara, in County Meath, was the seat of the ancient high kings of Ireland. The man is not named, and no source for his story is given in the poem, which reads like a legend in miniature. It belongs with other late poems in which Yeats faces his own death, such as "The Man and the Echo" and "Under Ben Bulben".
Form
Twenty unrhymed lines of blank verse, mostly five beats, in a single unbroken block, with line 13 stretching longer. The style is plain and narrative, like a chronicle or saga. Emotion is kept out of the telling, so the calm, orderly account of the death carries the weight.
