"September 1913" is one of the best-known works by the twentieth-century Irish poet W.B. Yeats. It was written on the occasion of the 1913 Dublin lock-out dispute between Dublin's workers and the merchants and shopkeepers who made up the city's middle class. In the poem, Yeats skewers that middle class, accusing them of complacency and shortsightedness. Alluding to a number of self-sacrificing nationalist and separatist figures throughout Irish history, among them Yeats's own contemporary John O'Leary and the eighteenth-century group United Irishmen, Yeats argues that middle-class Dubliners of his own time have betrayed the promise of Irish independence and "Romantic Ireland."
The poem consists of four eight-line stanzas, or octaves, written in iambic tetrameter. Each octave contains an ABABCDCD rhyme scheme, with an identical or near-identical refrain repeated at the close of each stanza. In the refrain, the speaker claims that the dream of "Romantic Ireland" is dead, as is the separatist John O'Leary. The poem's tone is bitter and caustic, and Yeats makes heavy use of verbal irony to show his speaker's blend of sadness and contempt at the state of Irish nationhood.
Despite the accusations leveled at other members of the Irish public, the poem ultimately serves as a rallying cry, encouraging national unity across class and religious differences, and expressing impatience at those who, in the speaker's eyes, betray or compromise that unity.
