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Death

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1933

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

While Yeats’s poem functions without specific historical context as a meditation on death in general, the “great man” mentioned in the poem is a reference to a particular man. The poem was written partly as a response to the assassination of Irish politician Kevin O’Higgins. In order to better understand O’Higgins’s place in both Yeats’s and the Irish imagination, it is important to first grasp the basics of the Irish Civil War. The war, fought in the early 1920s, was a result of many years of tensions between the people and national identity of Ireland and its rule by Britain. Specifically, the war centered on the establishment of what was called the Irish Free State, which made Ireland a semi-independent political entity, though one definitively under the political dominion of the British Commonwealth.

Kevin O’Higgins belonged to the political party Cumann na nGaedheal, which supported the establishment of the Irish Free State and fought against its resistors, the Irish Republican Army (e.g., the IRA). Yeats knew O’Higgins personally and, like him, had grown up with ties to the IRA’s ideological focus on Irish independence before becoming more conservative and supporting British rule. O’Higgins was only 35, but he served as vice president and minister of Home Affairs to the government, at the time of his assassination by the IRA in 1927. Yeats allegedly refused to eat the day he heard of O’Higgins’s murder, and instead simply wandered the streets until sunset. Yeats admired O’Higgins, enough to think of him as a “great man” (Line 7) who didn’t fear death at the hands of “murderous men” (Line 8).

Literary Context

W. B. Yeats is widely considered to be an important figure of literary Modernism. Broadly speaking, Modernist poetry was written between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th, characterized by its effort to break from the formal and lyric traditions of the poetry that came before. Poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Mina Loy, along with W. B. Yeats, all forged new ways of writing poetry in the early 20th century. They, and others like them, wrote poetry that broke traditional formal poetic rules (like rigid metrical or rhyming constraints) and innovated with the use of bold images, heavy symbolism, and drew on and blended various cultural and mythological traditions.

Yeats published his poem “Death” in his 1933 collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems. The book was released the same year as George Oppen’s groundbreaking and innovative poetry debut Discrete Series, Gertrude Stein’s experimental The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, E.E. Cummings’s formally subversive EIMI, and William Carlos Williams’s bold first collection Collected Poems. Each of these other texts is radical in its own way, doing away with traditional punctuation, syntax, lineation, and even prose/poetry distinctions. “Death,” on the other hand, is distinguished by its regular meter, traditional end-rhyme, and eschewal of wild imagery. While Yeats’s poetry sometimes experiments with symbolism, innovates with his occult mytho-spiritualist worldview, or leaves traditional meter and form behind, this poem remains starkly and simply non-radical. This poetic traditionalism is in part typical of Yeats’s late period, exemplifying the conservative and pared-down verse for which he is in partly known.