Siren Song Essay Example for Free

Siren Song Essay The progressing theme of Yeats poem Easter 1916 is one which moves from the perspective of a pacifist lamenting the horrors and cost of violence, to an activist who has been so deeply impacted by the deaths of those around him who rose to action, that he is ready to act, violently if necessary, himself. In the poems opening, the speaker admits that he has very little familiarity with those who are considered revolutionaries. He remarks that I have passed with a nod of the head/Or polite meaningless words,/Or have lingered awhile and said/Polite meaningless words, (Yeats) which indicates not only that the speaker is disengaged from the revolutionaries at a political level, but also that the speaker has taken refuge in societal manners and mores. The implication of the repeated word polite is that the speaker of the poem is a good citizen, a law-abiding man with manners and social sensibilities. The ensuing stanzas of the poem trace the realization on behalf of the poems speaker that each of the revolutionaries who were killed were, themselves, good citizens, with manners and polite etiquette. In other words, the speaker of the poem begins to realize the revolutionaries are just like him: That womans days were spent/ In ignorant good-will, (Yeats) or This man had kept a school/And rode our winged horse; (Yeats) so that the speaker begins to see that his own lot is tied up with those he had previously tried to ignore. The strategy of presenting the poem in this fashion is to allow the reader of the poem, also, to make the same emotional journey as the poems speaker, moving from detached ambivalence to involved emotionality. One of the most powerful devices is its modulated refrain which reveals variations of the sudden emotional shift in the poems speaker: All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born. (Yeats). The refrain indicates that violence or the will to do violence is terrible; but the communal reality of a shared community, race, and nation represents beauty and is, as such, an irresistible Siren Song and it is this observation in the poem that hits at the poems true anit-war theme: demonstrating that a nation, a race, a people cannot be broken or occupied without consequence.