Three Songs to the Same Tune
About the text
Yeats first published this poem in 1934. It is out of copyright in Ireland and the EU, but in the United States it stays in copyright until the start of 2030, 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 2030.
It begins: Grandfather sang it under the gallows
In brief
SummaryThree rough marching songs about order, fanatics and Ireland's heroic past.
Three songs, all meant for one marching tune. In the first, a grandfather sings on the gallows cart that money and girls are good but a strong cause and hard blows are better, until the rope cuts him off; the chorus calls to hammer down fanatics and clowns. The second demands that the sacrifices of past generations be justified, warning that failure turns history into rubbish, while a fierce young woman shouts to drown all the dogs. The third asks where the true leaders are, and says that when the top is empty it is time to take to the roads and march, as an old man grumbles about his grave.
Lines to remember
Down to the tune of O'Donnell Abu.
Where are the captains that govern mankind?
Line by line
Lines 1 to 10Song under the gallows
A grandfather, standing on the cart beneath the gallows, sings to the crowd that money is good and a girl might be better, but strong blows delight the mind. The chorus follows: down with the fanatics who would undo everything, hammer them down to the tune of "O'Donnell Abu".
Lines 11 to 30The rope jerks
He lists what he has lost: a girl, money, drink, all gone, leaving only a good cause and blows. The crowd takes up the tune. He starts the verse again, the rope jerks mid-phrase and he can sing no more, but he kicks before he dies, out of pride. The chorus returns after each stanza.
Lines 31 to 50Justify the generations
The second song calls on its hearers to justify the famous generations who died, lost their homes to the foxes, fled abroad or hid in caves to defend Ireland's soul. Between stanzas a fierce young woman cries to drown all the dogs that killed her goose and cat, a comic, savage refrain.
Lines 51 to 60Or history is rubbish
If we fail, all that great past turns into a trouble of fools. Those who come after will mock O'Donnell, the O'Neills, Emmet and Parnell, all the renown that fell. The young woman's refrain returns.
Lines 61 to 70Where are the captains
The third song begins with images of loyalty and breeding: the soldier saluting his captain, the worshipper kneeling, the good mare, Troy dying for Helen. Great nations flower from the top, while a slave bows to a slave. An old man's refrain wonders who would bother to dig his six feet of grave.
Lines 71 to 90Take to the roads
When nations are empty at the top and order weakens, it is time to find a good tune and march, to "any old words". The song asks where the captains are and what happens to a tree that is hollow inside, and ends in a blast of marching wind and the old man's weary refrain.
Themes
Order and leadership
The songs keep asking who should rule. The first wants fanatics and clowns hammered down; the third asks "Where are the captains" and pictures a hollow tree with nothing within it. Yeats's ideal is a nation led from the top by the able, with soldiers proud to salute. The songs are a direct, uneasy expression of his political thinking in the 1930s.
The heroic past
The second song roll-calls Irish history: generations who fled, hid in caves or died on the scaffold, and heroes from O'Donnell and the O'Neills to Emmet and Parnell. Their sacrifice has to be made good by the living, or it becomes "a trouble of fools". Memory here is a debt, and the song urges its hearers to pay it.
Song and crowd
These are songs about singing: the man on the gallows sings from his heart, the crowd catches up the tune, and marchers pick out "any old words". Yeats knows that a tune moves people more than an argument. The absurd refrains, the woman who would drown the dogs and the old man eyeing his grave, keep undercutting the grand words.
Context
The songs first appeared in a book in The King of the Great Clock Tower, Commentaries and Poems (Cuala Press, 1934), and were collected in A Full Moon in March (Macmillan, 1935). They are generally linked to Yeats's brief interest in 1933 in General Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirt movement, which he soon lost. He later rewrote them as "Three Marching Songs" for Last Poems (1939).
"O'Donnell Abu" is a nineteenth-century Irish marching song celebrating the O'Donnells of Tyrconnell. The O'Donnells and O'Neills led the Ulster chieftains' long war against Elizabethan England; Emmet and Parnell are later heroes of Irish nationalism. Naming them all in one stanza, the song asks the living to prove worthy of that whole line of sacrifice.
Form
Each song is built from stanzas of four long, heavily stressed lines and two short ones, alternating with a four-line refrain: the chorus about fanatics in the first song, the woman and her dogs in the second, the old man in the third. The rhymes are loose and often half rhymes, and the thumping rhythm is built for marching feet.