Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
These two short lines accomplish an enormous amount in terms of communicating Parnell's complex legacy. While Yeats will go on to present Parnell as totally rejected and disgraced, here, he points out that he remains a respected and revered figure in many ways. After all, a monument to him stands in the very city where he has been rejected. However, a seemingly nonchalant aside casts doubt on the monument's significance as a symbol of respect. The speaker expresses doubt that the sculptor has even been paid for his work, implying that the monument itself is insufficiently respected. Moreover, this aside suggests a widespread disregard for the arts, setting the stage for a reference to Hugh Lane's failures to bring art to Dublin.
Your enemy, an old foul mouth, had set
The pack upon him.
These lines stand out because of their abrupt, intense disruption of the poem's meter. This is one of several times in the poem when Yeats breaks the iambic pentameter pattern he has established. While most lines in this work have ten syllables, with the stress falling on every second syllable, here Yeats cuts off a line at the halfway point after only five syllables. This creates a feeling of harshness and even violence, mimicking the harshness of the public turn against Lane and Parnell. Moreover, the line's sudden end matches the sudden end of each man's ambitions, thwarted by public opinion. Meanwhile, the diction used in these lines—the reference to an enemy as a "mouth" and to the public as a "pack"—increases the vivid sense of a physical or even an animal attack, rather than a merely rhetorical one.
And gather the Glasnevin coverlet
About your head till the dust stops your ear,
Glasnevin is a Dublin neighborhood—and more importantly, for purposes of this passage, it is the name of the cemetery in which Parnell was buried. The mention of Glasnevin is the only direct allusion in a poem that otherwise takes a light touch with references to real life. Despite the tonal intensity of this polemic, Yeats avoids referring to his subjects by name, and avoids stating that the poem takes place in Dublin or even in Ireland. Only the nod to Glasnevin, late in the poem, acts as a concrete confirmation of these facts. Still, Yeats uses fanciful imagery, imagining the cemetery's ground as a blanket. Through this image, Yeats relegates even a highly specific reference to Dublin geography to a realm of strangeness and fantasy.
