Introductory Rhymes

Yeats asks his ancestors' pardon for having no child, only a book.

The poem that opens Responsibilities is one long sentence addressed to Yeats's ancestors. He calls on them one by one: a Dublin merchant, a country scholar who was Robert Emmet's friend, soldiers and traders, the Butlers who fought at the Boyne, a merchant skipper, and most of all a "silent and fierce old man" whose example taught him that "Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun". The request, held back until the end, is for pardon. Close on forty-nine, and after a "barren passion", he has no child to carry on their blood: "nothing but a book".

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 6Merchant and scholar

   "Pardon, old fathers" begins a sentence that will not end until line 22. He imagines his ancestors still within "ear-shot" and names the first: a Dublin merchant, a trader "out of Galway into Spain", and a "country scholar, Robert Emmet's friend", remembered by the poor for a hundred years.

2. Lines 7 to 12The Boyne

   He praises "Traders or soldiers" whose blood never passed "through any huckster's loin": none was mean or grasping. He salutes the "Old Butlers" who stood by the Boyne "Till your bad master blenched and all was lost", loyal to a king who lost his nerve.

3. Lines 13 to 18Skipper and old man

   A merchant skipper leaps overboard for "a ragged hat", a gesture of reckless pride. Above all he recalls a "silent and fierce old man" whose example made the boy say "Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun": courage and generosity that never count the cost.

4. Lines 19 to 22Nothing but a book

   The plea arrives at last. He asks pardon "for a barren passion's sake": at almost forty-nine he has "no child" and "nothing but a book" to prove the blood he shares with them. The repeated "nothing but" makes the confession plain and bare.

Themes

Context

The poem opens Responsibilities, published by the Cuala Press in May 1914; an earlier title was "Pardon, old fathers". Yeats was born in June 1865, so "close on forty-nine" places it in late 1913 or early 1914. The "barren passion" is his long, unreturned love for Maud Gonne. He would not marry until 1917.

The ancestors are real. The "country scholar" is his great-grandfather John Yeats, rector of Drumcliffe in County Sligo, and the "silent and fierce old man" is his grandfather William Pollexfen, the Sligo shipowner. Yeats later admitted in a note that "free of ten and four" was "an error I cannot now correct": he believed Irish merchants exempt from certain duties were "free of the eight and six".

Form

Twenty-two lines of iambic pentameter in a single sentence. The rhymes come in three sets of six (ABCABC: "remain", "end", "four", "Spain", "friend", "poor") and a closing quatrain, and some are only half rhymes ("sake" and "book"). "Pardon" returns at lines 1, 9 and 19, and what it asks pardon for is held back until the last four lines, so the confession lands with weight.