Beautiful Lofty Things
Beautiful Lofty Things - context Summary
Irish Revival Faces Gathered
This short lyric assembles portraits of real people from Yeats's circle and the Irish literary revival—his father, O'Leary, Standish O'Grady, Augusta Gregory, Maud Gonne—alongside mythic imagery. The poem fixes brief scenes and gestures to evoke a vanished public culture and personal memories, mixing admiration, irony, and nostalgia. The closing line, a thing never known again
, frames the poem as an elegiac remembrance of a lost era.
Beautiful lofty things: O'Leary's noble head; My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd: 'This Land of Saints,' and then as the applause died out, 'Of plaster Saints'; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back. Standish O'Grady supporting himself between the tables Speaking to a drunken audience high nonsensical words; Augusta Gregory seated at her great ormolu table, Her eightieth winter approaching: 'Yesterday he threatened my life. I told him that nightly from six to seven I sat at this table, The blinds drawn up'; Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting a train, Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head: All the Olympians; a thing never known again.
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