September 1913

W.B. Yeats · Leaving Cert Poetry

A furious attack on a money-counting present set against the memory of Ireland’s patriot dead, whose refrain shifts meaning with every repetition and whose final stanza undercuts its own heroic myth-making.

Context

Written by W.B. Yeats and first published in 1913, the poem responds to Yeats’s disillusionment with the Dublin Catholic middle class, sharpened by disputes of that period including the Hugh Lane gallery bequest controversy. It sets that present-day materialism against the memory of earlier Irish nationalist figures: the Fenian John O’Leary, the exiled Wild Geese, and the executed 1798 leaders Edward Fitzgerald, Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone.

Key Moments

The poem opens mid-argument, straight into contempt, greasy turning routine shopkeeping into something physically distasteful.

“What need you, being come to sense, / But fumble in a greasy till”September 1913

Coins and prayers are equated in the same grammatical structure, the charge being that this generation’s religion has become as small and mechanical as its accounting.

“And add the halfpence to the pence / And prayer to shivering prayer, until”September 1913

The refrain lands for the first time as a verdict, angry rather than mournful, the direct conclusion to stanza one’s accusation.

“Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”September 1913

Yet turns the poem toward the patriot dead, given an elemental, uncontainable energy that is the direct opposite of stanza one’s stillness.

“They have gone about the world like wind,”September 1913

Widening to exile and the named 1798 leaders, the poem admits their courage bordered on madness while insisting that madness beats calculated caution.

“Was it for this the wild geese spread / The grey wing upon every tide;”September 1913

“For this Edward Fitzgerald died,”September 1913

“All that delirium of the brave?”September 1913

The final stanza imagines summoning the dead back, then undercuts its own three stanzas of praise: a patriot’s motive included, alongside politics, something as human and unglamorous as romantic obsession.

“Some woman’s yellow hair / Has maddened every mother’s son”September 1913

The clearest statement of the poem’s value inversion follows directly: the merchants weigh every halfpence, the patriots weighed nothing at all.

“They weighed so lightly what they gave.”September 1913

The refrain’s final variant swaps the abstract Romantic Ireland and It’s for the personal they’re, closing the poem in weary, personal acceptance rather than either anger or celebration.

“But let them be, they’re dead and gone, / They’re with O’Leary in the grave.”September 1913

Do not treat the refrain as identical each time it returns: it moves from verdict, to lament, to exhausted confirmation, to personal acceptance, across its four appearances.

Key Themes

Materialism opens the poem and sets the terms of everything that follows. Sacrifice and martyrdom dominate stanzas two and three, built through named historical figures rather than abstraction. Disillusionment and demythologising arrive in stanza four, complicating rather than simply extending the elegy: the poem does not end in straightforward hero-worship. Personal acceptance closes it, the refrain’s last variant naming the dead as people rather than as an idea.

Literary Devices

Direct accusation and visceral imagery, dried the marrow from the bone, open the poem in contempt rather than reflection. Yet performs real structural work twice, first turning the poem from present-day accusation to admiration, then again in stanza four to set up its own demythologising move. Repeated words are reused with reversed meaning, save meaning hoarded wealth in stanza one and meaning nothing left to hoard in stanza two, making the stanzas argue with each other directly. The refrain’s four appearances are not simple repetition: identical words carry a different emotional register each time, from angry verdict to lament to exhausted ritual to weary personal acceptance, which is the poem’s key technical achievement.

Mood

The poem moves from open contempt and sarcasm in stanza one, through elegiac admiration building across stanzas two and three, to a wry, demythologising complication in stanza four that ends in weary, personal acceptance rather than either anger or straightforward celebration.

Conclusion

September 1913 argues that a society which measures everything in halfpence has forgotten what earlier generations of Irish patriots gave without counting the cost, but do not read it as straightforward hero-worship. The final stanza deliberately complicates that heroism, suggesting personal, even trivial motives sat alongside political ones: the poem is elegy plus demythologising, not simple celebration, and its refrain accrues new meaning with each stanza rather than repeating a single, fixed judgement.

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