Comment First-Yeats was writing about the ineptness and naivete of his own people in this poem. He decries the end of what he calls "Romantic Ireland", a term which could mean the end of idealism, or patriotism, or the end of a sense of morality.
I choose to post this not necessarily because I am a republican, but because the death of Ireland surely has happened now with the passing of the abortion law, and the coming ssm law.
The Celtic Tiger was a symptom of the same greed mentioned in this poem. After one hundred years, there is no difference in the apathy, greed, selfishness and pie-in-the-sky lack of reality of the people here.
Yeats, for all his involvement in the occult and his own romantic fantasies, would not recognize his green island.
The real Catholics are now the exiles, those who are orthodox and love the Church. The rest are blind.
September 1913
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry `Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son':
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.