Roger Casement
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: I say that Roger Casement
In brief
SummaryA street ballad defending Roger Casement against a campaign of slander.
Written as a ballad to be sung, the poem defends Roger Casement, hanged for treason in 1916. The poet says Casement did what he had to do, and that dying on the gallows is nothing new for an Irish patriot. What is new is the way his enemies, afraid of history's verdict, blackened his name with forged evidence backed by a perjurer and spread it round the world, even through their ambassador. The last two stanzas call on everyone who repeated the story to come forward and speak in public, so that some amends are made to a gallant gentleman lying in quicklime.
Lines to remember
To this most gallant gentleman
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4Nothing new
The ballad opens with a plain declaration of support: Casement did what he had to do. His death on the gallows is "nothing new", one more in a long line of Irish executions. The flat tone makes the defence sound like common sense.
Lines 5 to 12Forgery and perjury
His enemies, fearing they would lose before the judgement of Time, turned to a trick: forgery, to blacken his good name, with a perjurer ready to swear it true. They broadcast it to the world, and that, the ballad says, is something new.
Lines 13 to 16Whispered abroad
Even Spring Rice, as the British ambassador, had to whisper the story, and then public speakers and writers by the score took it up. The ballad names an official to show how high the campaign reached.
Lines 17 to 24Make amends
The last stanzas summon everyone who spread the tale to leave the forger and the perjurer and speak up in public. Amends are owed to a "most gallant gentleman" buried in quicklime, the ballad's last and most bitter image.
Themes
Slander and justice
The poem is less about Casement's actions than about how his reputation was destroyed. It accepts his death as the fate of a rebel but protests at the smear that followed. Its demand is public correction: those who spread the story should now speak "in public" to undo it.
Ireland and England
The enemies are never named as a nation, only as "they" with their ambassador, forger and perjurer, but the target is plainly the British state. The ballad sets Irish loyalty to a dead patriot against an official machine of propaganda, a quarrel Yeats returns to in "The Ghost of Roger Casement".
Context
The poem was first published in book form in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, May 1938). Roger Casement (1864 to 1916), a former British consul famous for exposing atrocities in the Congo and Peru, was hanged in London in August 1916 for seeking German help for an Irish rising. While appeals for mercy were under way, pages from diaries recording his homosexual life were shown privately to influential people to undermine support.
Yeats wrote after reading a book that argued the diaries were forged. Cecil Spring Rice was the British ambassador in Washington in 1916. The fifth stanza is said to have first named a living English writer, whom Yeats replaced with "Tom and Dick" after that writer replied. Later examinations have generally judged the diaries genuine, though the question was disputed for decades. Casement's remains were returned to Ireland in 1965.
Form
Six quatrains in ballad metre, alternating four-beat and three-beat lines, rhyming only on the second and fourth lines, sometimes loosely ("Time" and "name"). The simple, singable form is deliberate: this is a street ballad meant to spread as widely as the slander it answers. Stanzas 3 and 4 run on, like a speaker warming to his case.
