Parnell's Funeral

Yeats blames the Irish crowd for Parnell's fall and judges their successors.

The poem begins at Parnell's burial in 1891, beside the tomb of Daniel O'Connell, with a star falling over the crowd. Yeats sets beside it an ancient scene of sacrifice: a boy shot with an arrow and his heart cut out. Earlier Irish martyrs were killed by strangers, he says, and the nation watched as if at a play; Parnell was dragged down by his own people, in a popular rage, and all Ireland shares the guilt. He asks to be judged himself. The short second part turns to the politicians of the 1930s: if de Valera, Cosgrave or O'Duffy had eaten Parnell's heart and taken in his solitary strength, Ireland would have been better led.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 7The crowd at the grave

   A crowd stands under the tomb of the "Great Comedian", usually taken to be Daniel O'Connell. Storm cloud blows across the sky and a bright star shoots down. Yeats asks what shudder runs through the crowd's "animal blood" and what sacrifice this is, and whether anyone remembers an ancient Cretan arrow that pierced a star.

2. Lines 8 to 15An ancient sacrifice

   He describes the scene he has in mind: a frenzied crowd under starlit branches, a beautiful boy seated in a tree, a woman with a bow. She shoots him, and as an image of the Great Mother she cuts out his heart. Some ancient craftsman stamped boy and tree on a Sicilian coin. The falling star at the funeral becomes this slain boy.

3. Lines 16 to 23Our own guilt

   Ages reverse one another. When foreigners killed Emmet, Fitzgerald and Tone, the Irish watched as if at a painted stage, untouched. Parnell was different: popular rage, a kind of hysteria, dragged him down. This time nobody else shared the guilt, and it was no play. The Irish themselves "devoured his heart".

4. Lines 24 to 31Judge me too

   Yeats turns the accusation on himself and says he thirsts for it. Everything sung or said in Ireland, he claims, is a lie bred by the contagion of the crowd, except the kind of savage rhyme that kills rats. Let him be stripped bare and judged, man or animal.

5. Lines 32 to 39De Valera and Cosgrave

   In the second part he takes back one sentence. Had de Valera eaten Parnell's heart, no demagogue would have won and no civil war torn the land. Had Cosgrave done so, the nation's imagination would have been satisfied, or at least its government in strong hands, and O'Higgins, its only statesman, would not have died.

6. Lines 40 to 43Swift's dark grove

   He starts on O'Duffy, then breaks off and names no more. Their school was a crowd; Parnell's master was solitude. The last lines picture Parnell passing through Jonathan Swift's "dark grove" and gathering a bitter wisdom that strengthened his blood.

Themes

Context

Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was dropped by most of his party after the O'Shea divorce case of 1890 and died in 1891. He was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, near O'Connell. The poem first appeared in a book in The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems (Cuala Press, 1934), and was collected in A Full Moon in March (Macmillan, 1935). An earlier title was "A Parnellite at Parnell's Funeral".

By then Yeats had served as a senator of the Free State. W. T. Cosgrave led its first government; Kevin O'Higgins, his Minister for Justice, was assassinated in 1927; Eamon de Valera took power in 1932; Eoin O'Duffy led the Blueshirts in 1933. Emmet, Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone were the heroes of the risings of 1798 and 1803.

Form

Part I has four stanzas in five-beat lines, a seven-line stanza followed by three of eight lines, each alternating rhymes and closing on a couplet. Part II has three quatrains rhyming ABAB. The grand, rolling stanzas of the vision give way to short, blunt quatrains, and the last one breaks off mid-line as Yeats refuses to name more names.