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Posted by steve mackin on June 01, 19101 at 14:22:03:
In Reply to: September 1913 analysis and easter 1916 posted by J L on May 31, 19101 at 19:33:31:
the line refers to John MacDonagh, a teacher and poet. Here's a short verse by MacDonagh:
On a Poet Patriot
By Thomas MacDonagh
HIS songs were a little phrase
Of eternal song,
Drowned in the harping of lays
More loud and long.
His deed was a single word,
Called out alone
In a night when no echo stirred
To laughter or moan.
But his songs new souls shall thrill,
The loud harps dumb,
And his deed the echoes fill
When the dawn is come.
i think the third stanza is fairly clear. the rebels have been transformed (utterly transformed) into that solid, implacable thing which forever alters the course of history, the river, a thing ignored by the rider (the english, the gentry, whoever). there is a great website about the easter rebellion: http://indigo.ie/~1916/index.html
"september, 1913" is a lament for an ireland that yeats hoped would be, and was not. i think it was stirred into being by a general strike in 1913. yeats had an ever evolving idea, a complex mythic image of ireland that began with his association as a young man with john o'leary, father of the fenian movement. though yeats and o'leary had parted ways more than a decade before 1913 (and o'leary died in 1907) he never failed to evoke o'leary when needed.