The Great Day
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: Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
In brief
SummaryRevolution changes who holds the whip, but never ends the whipping.
A four-line epigram on revolution. The speaker cheers for revolution and more cannon fire, then shows its result: one beggar on horseback lashing another beggar on foot. He cheers again, and gives the verdict. The beggars have swapped places, but the lash goes on. The "great day" of the title, the longed-for day of revolution, turns out to change only who suffers and who inflicts the pain.
Lines to remember
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
Line by line
Lines 1 to 4The beggars change places
Two mock cheers for revolution each lead to a flat picture of what it brings. A beggar raised to horseback whips the beggar on foot; then the roles reverse. The repeated cheer grows more ironic as the lash goes on.
Themes
Revolution
The poem doubts that violent change brings real freedom. Power passes from one set of poor men to another, and the cruelty remains. The old proverb about a beggar on horseback, who rides to ruin, lies behind the image, and the cheering sounds hollower each time it is repeated.
Power and cruelty
The lash is the true subject. Whoever rides, someone is whipped, and the man who was beaten yesterday is the one holding the whip today. Yeats's bleak view is that domination survives every upheaval, a thought that runs through his late political poems and through "Parnell", printed beside it.
Context
The poem was first published in New Poems (Cuala Press, Dublin, May 1938), in a group of short epigrams with "Parnell", "What Was Lost" and "The Spur". Published after Ireland's revolution and civil war, and amid the political upheavals of 1930s Europe, it shares the disillusion of "The Leaders of the Crowd" and "The Second Coming".
Form
Two couplets of long lines, each opening with a cheer and each couplet rhyming loosely ("shot" and "foot", "again" and "on"). The repetition of the cheer, with the image changing beneath it, makes the second couplet a sardonic replay of the first.
