Reading Yeats’s “September 1913” in its Contexts

W. B. Yeats’s final title for his poem “September 1913” creates two different contexts for current readers, depending on whether they are Irish or foreign. For most foreign readers of the collected poems, the date signifies little beyond a year before the start of World War i. But for most Irish readers the title signifies a critical month in the greatest strike and lockout in Irish history—a confrontation between organized labor led by the fiery James Larkin and Dublin employers led by the determined railroad magnate and newspaper owner William Martin Murphy. That context adds a whole level of meaning to such famous phrases as “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,” “Fumble in a greasy till,” and “delirium of the brave,” among others. Yet that is only the start of the effect of different contexts—historical, textual, and bibliographic—on the complexities of this great poem, one of Yeats’s first in his mature bardic voice.

Yeats himself gestured toward other political contexts in a note first published in the Cuala Press Responsibilities volume a year later—1914. “In the thirty years or so during which I have been reading Irish newspapers, three public controversies have stirred my imagination,” he writes; “The first was the Parnell controversy. . . . And another was the dispute over The Playboy [of the Western World]. . . . The third prepared for the [Dublin] Corporation’s refusal of a building for Sir Hugh Lane’s famous collection of pictures. . . . These controversies [were] political, literary, and artistic.” Yeats identified the note as applicable to the suite of five poems beginning with “To a Wealthy Man Who Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery If It Were Proved the People Wanted Pictures” followed by “September 1913” and ending with a poem addressed to Parnell, “To a Shade,” which was followed two poems later by the six-line “On Those That Hated ‘The Playboy of the Western World,’ 1907.” The note reinforces the connection of the three controversies implicit in the ordering of the poems themselves.

A further link comes through the formidable figure of William Martin Murphy, one of Yeats’s chief antagonists in all three controversies. In Yeats’s eyes Murphy had not only opposed both Parnell in politics and Synge’s Playboy on the stage, but had done so with both ill will and misrepresentation. Yeats saw the same “frenzy of detraction” in the fight over whether Dublin should build a municipal art gallery to house Sir Hugh Lane’s famous collection of nineteenth-century pictures (Lane was Lady Gregory’s nephew). The opponents, supported in particular by both Dublin’s rich employers and the lower middle class, publicly accused Lane of somehow feathering his own nest; they branded the paintings as voguish humbug and called for spending the money on more tangible civic improvements such as hospitals. And a fervent nationalist like Yeats’s sometime beloved Maud Gonne saw the Protestant Lane as a swindling social climber and, with her characteristic anti-Semitism, accused him of “acting as after all one expects a jew picture dealer to do.” Lane’s supporters included not only Yeats and his circle but also Jim Larkin and the strikers, but his tactlessness rivaled Murphy’s bluster. As Yeats’s biographer Roy Foster remarks, “through the Corporation’s pusillanimity, Murphy’s enmity and Lane’s arrogance, the pictures were lost to Dublin.” They passed instead to the Tate Gallery in London after Lane went down with the torpedoed ship Lusitania in 1915, but, owing to an unwitnessed codicil to his will, the collection eventually rotated between Dublin and London and is now mostly in Dublin.

Following immediately after “To a Wealthy Man Who Promised a Second Subscription” in the order of collected poems, “September 1913” weds the art gallery fight to the great lockout of 1913 that affected 100,000 workers and their families, one-third of the population of Dublin in those days. Murphy and the employers’ organization were determined to fight Larkin and the union, and an especially bitter campaign followed for almost half a year, eventually replete with mass hunger, the intervention...