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In this poem, Yeats makes references to
ancient Greek mythology and history(Pythagoras,
Salamis, Phidias), Hamlet and Shakespeare and
Irish mythology(Cuchulain). The poem, which was
one of Yeats' last works, was published in
March 1939.
Pythagoras planned it. Why did
the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved
or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked
character.
But boys and girls, pale from
the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what
they were,
That passion could bring
character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some
public place
Live lips upon a
plummet-measured face.
No! Greater than Pythagoras,
for the men
That with a mallet or a chisel"
modelled these
Calculations that look but
casual flesh, put down
All Asiatic vague
immensities,
And not the banks of oars that
swam upon
The many-headed foam at
Salamis.
Europe put off that foam when
Phidias
Gave women dreams and dreams
their looking-glass.
One image crossed the
many-headed, sat
Under the tropic shade, grew
round and slow,
No Hamlet thin from eating
flies, a fat
Dreamer of the Middle Ages.
Empty eyeballs knew
That knowledge increases
unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is
all the show.
When gong and conch declare the
hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's
emptiness.
When Pearse summoned
Cuchulain to his side.
What stalked through the post
Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number,
measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that
ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy
modern tide
And by its formless spawning
fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that
we may trace
The lineaments of a
plummet-measured face.
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Before we look at the mathematical
references, let us begin with the last
verse, which refers to the Easter Uprising,
Easter Monday, April 1916, when Padraig Pearse,
The O’Rahilly and James Connelly and hundreds
of Irish Volunteers seized the GPO (General
Post Office) in O'Connell Street (then
Sackville Street), Dublin and held it until the
following Friday.
The British Army surrounded the Post Office
and had it shelled from the Gunboat Helga,
which had been brought up the River Liffey. The
intense shelling set the GPO alight. The
insurrectionists then deployed around Henry
street and Moore Street where The O'Rahilly was
shot dead. The surrender was given on Saturday
afternoon.
In total, 142 British soldiers and DMP
(Dublin Metropolitan Police) were killed while
64 insurgents were killed. A total of 254
civilians were killed during the week, many of
them caught in crossfire. An estimated 2,000
people were injured during the fighting. In
addition to the loss of life, large sections of
the centre of Dublin had been destroyed
especially in and around O Connell Street. The
rebel leadership were tried and convicted and
sentenced to death. Following the court
martial, Pearse, McDonagh, Clarke and other
were executed by firing squad in Kilmainham
Gaol on the morning of May 3rd. On the morning
of May 12th., the wounded James Connolly, was
brought to the Gaol and shot in the yard,
whilst strapped to a chair because he was too
weak to stand up. Sean MacDermott was shot
alongside him.
After the surrender, the surviving Irish
Volunteers were corralled together and lead,
like animals, up to the Rotunda Hospital, at
the top of O'Connell Street. Their captors were
lead by a British Army Officer with a long
drooping moustache. The local children used to
call him "Pig-tails" because of this strange
moustache. As he was in charge of rounding up
the Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army and
treated them so badly, he became a marked man.
Some years later, whilst serving in Gorey, Co.
Wexford, he was recognised and
assassinated.
Therein lies a twist. He was survived by his
Irish wife, who then decided to study medicine
in Dublin. The widow befriended some Jesuit
Priests who had an order house on Leeson
Street, adjacent to UCD in Earlsfort Terrace.
She never remarried and left her estate,
including some paintings to the Jesuit Order.
Some years ago, it was discovered that one of
the paintings was a Caravaggio - The Taking of
Christ. She had purchased it for small money
from a junk shop in Glasgow in the
twenties.
Incidentally, the Jesuits could have sold
the painting for many millions, but being the
decent people that they are - have entrusted it
to the people of Ireland on a long term loan.
Good on you, fathers.
Cuchulain was a mythological Irish
warrior-hero from pre-Christian Ireland.
Yeats often refers to him in his poetry. Pearse
summoned the spirit of Cuchulain to help him
with this crisis. There is a bronze statue of
Cuchulain in the GPO, that depicts him bound to
a rock on his last day of battle. He was so
bound so that his enemies would not know that
he had died. However, a raven descended and
started to pick his eyes out.
Yeats detested the modernisation of Ireland.
He championed the development of an independent
Irish culture whose roots sprung from Ireland's
pre-Christian history and which were nurtured
by ties to the land and the sea that
urbanization threatened to extinguish. He
remained loyal to the ideals of men like Pearse
and O'Rahilly, who struggled to free Ireland
from a centuries old and brutal oppressor.
Remember, this was not too long after the Great
Famines of the forties and the largely ignored
famines of the century's end.
The reference to "Pythagoras", "His numbers"
brings in his great interest in mathematics
leading to his huge involvement in
Numerology.
You may have seen on another page on this
site, that The Fir Bolg originally sailed from
Greece in their leather boats and Yeats weaves
that fact into this poem.
This poem could take many hours, to
analyze. Yeats was, as you will find, Ireland's
greatest poet.
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