In Memory Of Eva Gore Booth And Con Markiewicz - Analysis

Lissadell as a frozen first scene

The poem begins by pinning memory to a single, luminous tableau: The light of evening at Lissadell, with Great windows thrown open to the south. Yeats’s central claim emerges quietly but firmly here: what he loved in these women was not only their beauty, but the particular kind of possibility they embodied in youth—a possibility that history will later roughen, distort, and almost erase. The two sisters appear like figures in a painting, Two girls in silk kimonos, an image that makes their youth feel ceremonial, rare, and slightly theatrical. Even the detail one a gazelle turns one sister into pure grace—an animal metaphor that belongs to an Eden of ease and elegance before the harsh world breaks in.

The “raving autumn” that history brings

The poem’s mood tightens with the abrupt intrusion of season and violence: a raving autumn that shears / Blossom from the summer’s wreath. The diction turns from soft light and silk to a kind of manic cutting. This is where Yeats slides from nostalgia into elegy with teeth: time isn’t a gentle fading but an active force that mutilates what was blossoming. The political lives of the sisters are framed as part of this autumnal shearing—history as a weather system that strips and leaves stems.

How politics makes bodies look: “condemned,” “withered,” “gaunt”

Yeats then gives each sister a grim after-image. The older is condemned to death, then Pardoned, and forced to drag out lonely years, still Conspiring among the ignorant. The verbs do a lot of moral work: even when spared execution, she is made to live as a kind of remnant, and Yeats can’t resist the stinging phrase among the ignorant, which suggests both his contempt for the political crowd and his sorrow that she is stuck within it.

The younger is harder for him to grasp: I know not what she dreams, but he guesses Some vague Utopia. That vagueness is important—he can admire the impulse and still suspect it of being ungrounded. By the time she appears again, she is withered old and skeleton-gaunt, not simply aged but turned into a warning sign: An image of such politics. The tension is sharp: he loves them, yet he depicts their political passion as something that emaciates and turns a person into a symbol. In his telling, politics doesn’t just fail; it consumes the body and replaces the person with an “image.”

Trying to speak, and only managing to “recall”

Midway through, the speaker admits a recurring impulse: Many a time he thinks to seek them out and speak. Yet what follows is not a message he delivers to them, but a mental collage: that old Georgian mansion, pictures of the mind, That table and the talk of youth. The repetition of the opening scene—again Two girls in silk kimonos, again one a gazelle—reveals a mind circling the same image because it is the only version that still feels whole. The poem’s grief, then, isn’t only that they died; it’s that history has made the speaker’s relationship to them mostly retrospective. Speech becomes recall; contact becomes portraiture.

The hinge: “Dear shadows” and the hard verdict

The poem turns outright when he addresses them as Dear shadows. The tenderness of “dear” lands against the chill of “shadows”: they are beloved, but unreachable, and perhaps already reduced by death (and by memory) to outlines. Now he claims they know it all, and what they know is bluntly named: All the folly of a fight over a common wrong or right. This is Yeats at his most severe and most intimate. He calls their struggle “folly” not because wrong and right don’t exist, but because “common” suggests a flattening—political slogans that swallow individual nuance, turning singular lives into predictable positions.

“No enemy but time”: praise and negation in one sentence

One of the poem’s fiercest contradictions is also its most beautiful compliment: The innocent and the beautiful / Have no enemy but time. On one level, Yeats is defending them: they were not truly defeated by political opponents; they were simply mortal. On another level, the line quietly denies the seriousness of their chosen enemies. If their only enemy is time, then the political struggle becomes secondary—almost a tragic misunderstanding of where danger really lies. The line therefore both elevates them (as innocent and beautiful) and robs their politics of its claimed centrality.

Matches, fire, and the fantasy of burning the whole argument down

The final movement becomes ritualistic and urgent: Arise, he says, and asks them to command him to strike a match and strike another until time catch. The desire is startling—he wants to set time itself on fire, to reverse the shearing autumn by making a counter-force of flame. If Should the conflagration climb, he imagines a world where even all the sages are forced to know. This is less a practical program than a grief-dream: if argument and activism could not save them, perhaps a purifying blaze could at least make the world understand what was lost.

Yet Yeats doesn’t end with pure lament; he ends with accusation and complicity. We the great gazebo built sounds like a shared project—an image of art, leisure, and cultivated life that belongs with Lissadell’s windows and youth’s “talk.” But then: They convicted us of guilt. The “we” expands beyond the sisters to a class, a circle, a whole inherited world that history has put on trial. In that context, the repeated plea Bid me strike a match is both defiance and self-implication: he wants to burn the courtroom, but he is also standing in it.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the sisters truly have no enemy but time, why does the poem keep returning to human judgment—condemned, Pardoned, convicted? The poem seems unable to decide whether history is an impersonal season or a set of human verdicts. That uncertainty is part of its honesty: it mourns what time does, but it also can’t forget what people did.

What survives: the gazelle, the skeleton, and the speaker’s uneasy love

By the end, the sisters exist in two dominant shapes: the opening gazelle and the later skeleton-gaunt. Between those extremes lies the poem’s central ache: the speaker cannot reconcile the radiant young women at Lissadell with the political images they became in public life. His tenderness keeps dragging him back to the silk kimonos and the talk of youth, but his bitterness keeps surfacing in words like folly and the bleak portrait of such politics. The poem mourns them, judges them, and finally tries to conjure them into one last act—not to win an argument, but to light a fire big enough to make loss undeniable.