| From teh title it is fairly obvious that the poem is a tribute to the Easter Rebellion in Ireland in 1916. Yeats speaks of how he knew people that were in the rebellion. They were just normal people that he saw everyday on the street, stopped and talked to inocently. They were nobody special, merely subjects for good jokes at the club. After the rebellion though, all this was changed for there was something else in the townspeople now that was not there before. Yeats then looks at notionalism in the form of a woman. She had been arguing with the people for ever so long that her once lovely appeal was lost and replaced by one that was 'shrill'. The man that owned the school could be the English, for they controlled what the Irish were taught. His helper and friend would be the British soldiers that were esnt to put the rebellion down. He was not a bad man, innocent in the whole thing, yet dragged into it. It was he that the wrath of Yeats fell upon for it was the soldier that was accredited with the death of one of his friends, perhaps the Major. In the last stanza, what Yeats is portraying is the growing nationalistic feelings and the slipping of the English grasp on Ireland. This would be seen in the slipping of the horse and the growing clouds, billowing up on themselves in a great uniting culmination calling for freedom. |