The Seven Sages

Seven old men honour four great Irish minds of the eighteenth century.

Seven old men talk in turn, like a chorus. The first four brag that their ancestors met the great Irishmen of the eighteenth century: Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne, and Swift's beloved Stella. They ask where their own thinking came from, and the answer is four minds that hated Whiggery, which they define as a levelling, bitter, rationalising spirit that never saw the world through the eyes of a saint or a drunkard. The modern world, they say, has gone over to Whiggery, and old men stand against it. They praise Burke's speeches against oppression, Goldsmith's pictures of the ruined countryside, Swift's fame and Berkeley's quiet voice that grew into thunder. Asked what schooling these men had, the last sage answers that they walked the roads, listening like children, and learned that wisdom comes from beggary.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 7Ancestral bragging

   Each of the first four sages claims a family link with greatness: a great-grandfather who spoke to Burke in Grattan's house, one who shared a tavern bench with Goldsmith, one who drank Berkeley's tar-water, and one who once saw Stella. The one-upmanship is comic, but it builds a living line back to the eighteenth century.

2. Lines 8 to 16What is Whiggery

   The Fifth asks where their ideas came from; the Sixth answers, from four minds that hated Whiggery. When reminded that Burke was himself a Whig, he replies that they hated it whether they knew it or not. Whiggery is then defined as a flattening, resentful rationalism, without the saint's vision or the drunkard's abandon.

3. Lines 17 to 18Old men massed

   The Seventh declares that everything is Whiggery now. The old men see themselves as a small army "massed against the world", a comic and defiant picture of age holding out against the modern spirit.

4. Lines 19 to 25Burke, Goldsmith, Swift

   Burke is praised for his great speeches against the oppression of the American colonies, Ireland, France and India. Goldsmith described the beggared roads and fields turned over to cattle, but did not live to see the shamrock of later rebellion rise from those fields. Swift's tomb is given a cryptic line of its own.

5. Lines 26 to 28A voice from Cloyne

   Berkeley's thought is pictured as a voice that begins as soft as a reed rustling at Cloyne and swells to a thunder-clap, a quiet philosophy that grew into a force able to shake the world.

6. Lines 29 to 32Wisdom from beggary

   Asked what schooling the four had, the Seventh gives the poem's conclusion. They walked the roads, imitating what they heard as children do, and understood that wisdom comes from poverty and from ordinary people rather than from theory.

Themes

Context

The poem was collected in The Winding Stair and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1933). In the late 1920s and 1930s Yeats turned to the Anglo-Irish writers of the eighteenth century as models of intellectual independence. The same four names stand together in "Blood and the Moon", in the same book, where his tower's stair is said to be the stair of Goldsmith, Swift, Berkeley and Burke.

Some references need unpacking. Grattan's house recalls Henry Grattan, the great orator of the Irish Parliament before the Act of Union. Burke's causes were the American colonists, the Irish, the victims of the French Revolution and the people of India, in the impeachment of Warren Hastings. Stella was Esther Johnson, Swift's lifelong friend.

Form

Thirty-two lines of blank verse, unrhymed pentameter, broken among seven speakers named by number. The lines are divided and shared, so the voices cut in on one another like a real conversation. The dramatic layout gives the feel of a chorus in a play.