Polite Meaningless Words
From the start of the poem, Yeats is pretty up front about the fact that he makes a lot of meaningless small talk with the people he runs into on the streets of Dublin. He even repeats the exact sa...
Terrible Beauty
Three times in the poem, Yeats ends a stanza with the phrase, "A terrible beauty is born." He even ends the poem with it, which should set off our spidey sense and tell us that it's probably an imp...
The Dead Fighters
During the second stanza of this poem, Yeats goes through a short list of some of the people he knew who fought in the Easter Uprising and who were either jailed for life or executed. It's not tota...
The Stone in the Stream
Yeats devotes the entire third stanza of this poem to talking about a stone that's sitting at the bottom of a stream. But it becomes clear pretty quickly that he's comparing the stone to the people...