Parnell
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: Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man
In brief
SummaryParnell tells a cheering labourer that freedom will not end his toil.
A two-line epigram. Charles Stewart Parnell, the great leader of Irish nationalism, comes down a road and speaks to a man who is cheering him. Ireland will win her freedom, he says, and the man will still be breaking stones. The promise and the warning arrive in the same breath. Political independence, however glorious, will not change the hard life of a poor labourer, and Parnell is clear-eyed enough to say so to his own supporter's face.
Lines to remember
Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 2Freedom and stone
The first line sets the scene like a folk anecdote: the leader on the road, the cheering man. The second gives Parnell's reply, joining national freedom and personal drudgery with a flat "and". Breaking stone for road-mending was among the hardest and worst-paid work, so the joke is bleak.
Themes
Freedom and poverty
The poem separates two kinds of freedom: the nation's and the individual's. Ireland may become free while the labourer's life stays exactly as it was. Published sixteen years after the founding of the Irish Free State, it carries a sense that the new state had not transformed the lives of the poor.
The clear-eyed leader
Yeats admired Parnell as a proud, aloof leader who did not flatter the crowd. Here he tells an admirer an unwelcome truth instead of a rousing promise. The cheering man and the unsentimental leader stand at opposite ends of the road.
Context
The poem was first published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, May 1938), where it sits among short epigrams such as "The Great Day" and "The Spur". Parnell (1846 to 1891) led the campaign for Irish Home Rule until his fall after a divorce scandal in 1890. He remained a hero for Yeats, who wrote about him in "To a Shade", "Parnell's Funeral" and "Come Gather Round Me, Parnellites".
Form
Two long lines of about six beats each, with no rhyme but a strong break in each line. The first reports, the second quotes, which gives the effect of a remembered saying or proverb. Its brevity is part of the point: the whole disappointment of politics fits in a sentence.