Sixteen Dead Men
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Text: Poetry, by W. B. Yeats (Standard Ebooks, 2024), from the collected editions of 1908 to 1928. Public domain.
In brief
SummaryAfter the 1916 executions, the dead leaders make political argument useless.
Before the leaders of the Easter Rising were shot, people could argue at length about "give and take", about what should and should not be done. Now that is impossible: the dead men are "loitering there / To stir the boiling pot". Someone suggests the country should stay quiet until Germany is beaten, but nobody can argue with Pearse now that he is "deaf and dumb", or weigh logic against "MacDonagh's bony thumb". The dead have found new comrades among the rebels of 1798, Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone, and they talk only with them, "bone to bone". The poem is short and bitter: executions have made martyrs, and martyrs cannot be reasoned with.
Lines to remember
The sixteen men were shot,
MacDonagh's bony thumb?
That converse bone to bone.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 6Before and after
"O but we talked at large" before "The sixteen men were shot". Now nobody can talk of compromise, "What should be and what not", because the dead are "loitering there / To stir the boiling pot". The homely image of a stirred pot makes the dead active, keeping passions on the boil.
Lines 7 to 12Arguing with the dead
"You say that we should still the land / Till Germany's overcome", but who can argue that "Now Pearse is deaf and dumb"? The dead cannot hear reason, and no logic can "outweigh / MacDonagh's bony thumb", a skeleton's thumb pressing on the scales.
Lines 13 to 18New comrades
The dead now listen only to "those new comrades", the rebels of 1798, "Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone". They will not "meddle with our give and take": they "converse bone to bone", a conversation among martyrs that the living are shut out of.
Themes
Martyrdom
The executions have given the dead more power than the living. They stir "the boiling pot", and "MacDonagh's bony thumb" outweighs any argument. By joining "Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone", the men of 1916 enter a line of Irish martyrs whose example cannot be answered with reason.
Politics and compromise
"Give and take" appears twice: the language of negotiation and patient politics. Before the executions it was possible to talk "at large". The poem shows that world ending, and the argument for waiting "Till Germany's overcome" losing all its force.
The dead
The dead are pictured physically: "deaf and dumb", with a "bony thumb", conversing "bone to bone". The grim humour makes a serious point. The dead are beyond persuasion, and they speak only to each other and to history, while the living argue on without them.
Context
The poem was collected in Michael Robartes and the Dancer, issued by the Cuala Press in February 1921, beside "Easter, 1916", "The Rose Tree" and "On a Political Prisoner". It looks back to the Easter Rising of April 1916 and the executions that followed, when most of the leaders were shot at Kilmainham Gaol in May. The sixteen are usually counted as the fifteen men shot in May (fourteen in Dublin, one in Cork) and Roger Casement, hanged in London in August 1916.
The argument to "still the land / Till Germany's overcome" was the case for waiting until the First World War ended, when Home Rule, already passed but suspended, was expected to take effect. Lord Edward FitzGerald and Wolfe Tone were leaders of the United Irishmen who died in the rising of 1798.
Form
Three six-line stanzas in ballad metre, alternating lines of four and three beats, rhymed on the even lines ("shot", "not", "pot"). The plain, song-like form suits a street ballad about public events, and each stanza closes on a hard, physical image: "pot", "thumb", "bone".
