Summary
The poem opens with an unidentified speaker directly addressing a shade, or a ghost. He wonders whether the shade has returned to visit the town where he once lived. Maybe, the speaker muses, he has come to see the monument to himself. As an aside, the speaker wonders whether the sculptor who created that monument has been paid. Or perhaps, the speaker wonders, the shade has come to the town in the evening. This is a better time to visit because people have disappeared for the night and been replaced by seagulls, and even the unadorned houses look grander. In fact, the speaker tells the shade to see these sights and then leave again, because the townspeople are still engaging in their typical bad behavior.
The speaker then mentions another man, who was very similar to the shade. Both of them were devoted to serving others. In both cases, if other people had only been willing to listen to them, they would have benefitted greatly. Their children's children would have become wiser and would have experienced happier, more peaceful emotional lives. But their efforts have failed and they have been driven away. This other man was particularly victimized by an enemy of the shade's, who spoke ill of him and turned the public against him.
Instructing the shade again, the speaker tells him to leave the town and the world of the living and to return to Glasnevin cemetery in Dublin, burying himself underground until the world becomes inaudible. The time for the shade to reemerge, taste the sea air, and listen to the conversations of Dubliners hasn't yet come—for now, it would only add to the pain the shade experienced during his life. He will be safer from this disappointment if he stays in the cemetery.
Analysis
This poem balances two opposite modes of storytelling, juxtaposing them in a way that creates an interesting tension. The work is at once a sharp, specific critique of Dublin's twentieth-century social world, and a fantastical, tale-like narrative. This odd contrast achieves several ends. Firstly, it allows Yeats to bring the figure of Parnell to life relatively unburdened by his subject's fame. Secondly, it slightly softens the harshness of the critique that he levels at his fellow Dubliners. Thirdly, it lends gravitas to the relatively pedestrian controversies and debates he lays out in the work.
Two real-life figures are central to this poem. The first is Charles Steward Parnell, an Irish politician and revolutionary during the late nineteenth century who fell into disgrace following an adultery scandal. The second is a slightly later figure, the gallerist and art collector Hugh Lane, whose attempts to found a municipal gallery in Dublin were thwarted in his lifetime. Lane died in 1915, a year before the publication of this poem. On the level of straightforward social critique, Yeats treats Parnell and Lane as parallel figures—each one self-sacrificing, idealistic, and wise, but brought unfairly into disgrace thanks to the pettiness and shortsightedness of their Dublin neighbors.
However, the poem is not, for all its tonal fierceness, a straightforward critique. Instead, Yeats repeatedly brings in narrative elements associated with the fairytale and folktale. The folkloric was a frequent topic of his poetry, but here, rather than referencing specific tales, he borrows stylistically from them. The most obvious way in which he does this is through the figure of the shade, or ghost. The shade's presence shifts the poem out of the realm of social realism and into that of fantasy. In doing so, it helps Yeats navigate a potential challenge: that of bringing a famous historical figure to life. While readers might have trouble letting go of their own preconceptions about Parnell, Yeats isn't writing about Parnell—at least, not exactly. Instead, he is writing about a ghostly, imagined version of the famous man, which liberates him somewhat from the preconceptions surrounding his subject. Moreover, by asking readers to suspend disbelief in an obvious and major way by accepting the supernatural, Yeats makes it feel relatively easy for those very same readers to suspend disbelief in smaller ways by accepting Yeats's description of Parnell's emotional life.
Folktales and fairytales tend, stylistically, to avoid highly specific identifying information and speak instead in generalities. Yeats takes a cue from these genres, avoiding the names of people and places to a conspicuous degree. Lane and Parnell are never actually identified by name. Even Dublin, the city where the poem takes place, is called only "the town." Only in the last paragraph, when Yeats mentions Glasnevin cemetery by name, is the Dublin setting made explicit (though this, too, remains fairly oblique). One useful effect of this vagueness is to make Yeats's anger at his fellow Dubliners slightly more palatable. While his attitude remains harsh, he does not go so far as to condemn specific individuals or even one specific city. Even if these specifics are clear in context, this keeps the poem from seeming combative to a point that might deter readers. It also positions the speaker, Parnell, and Yeats as above the petty, personal agendas enacted by their enemies.
Finally, by placing historical events from modern Dublin in a vaguely tale-like, fantastical realm, Yeats ensures that they do not feel unimportant or mundane. These disputes are elevated to questions of good and evil. Indeed, the metaphorical language Yeats uses positions Lane's detractors as almost violent or animalistic, rendering them both horrifying and universal in their viciousness. The men's enemy is "an old foul mouth," reduced to a mindless physical threat, while Dublin at large is "the Pack," suggesting not merely a thoughtless mob but also an almost feral one. Thus, the depersonalization of Dublin and Dubliners here both eases Yeats's caustic tone and operates as a layer of critique unto itself. It declines to hold any individual explicitly responsible, but, at the same time, suggests that the people responsible are more animal than human, and are predatory in their opposition to Yeats and Parnell.
