A Statesmans Holiday - Analysis

Trading the drawing room for a song

The poem’s central move is a deliberate abdication: the speaker turns away from the world of great houses—not because it is merely dull, but because it is morally and physically deforming. In that world, Riches drove out rank and Base drove out better blood; the result isn’t progress but contraction, where mind and body shrank. Against that shrinking, the speaker chooses a better trade: to sing night and morning. The repeated vision of Tall dames in grass-green Avalon becomes his alternative economy—value measured not by status or power, but by imaginative abundance.

A friend-group that knows and won’t speak

The first stanza sketches a social scene that looks like conversation but is really evasion. No Oscar ruled the table suggests the lack of a dazzling wit or artistic authority (and also the absence of someone brave enough to set a tone). The speaker has a troop of friends who realize that better talk had gone—and so they fill the void with odds and ends. The sharpest condemnation lands quietly: Some knew what ailed the world / But never said a thing. The poem’s bitterness isn’t aimed at ignorance; it’s aimed at knowing silence, a kind of polite complicity. Singing, then, is not escapism so much as a refusal to keep up the genteel muting of truth.

The mock-interview: who are you supposed to be?

The second stanza turns into a barrage of identities, as if the speaker is being heckled by public expectation. Am I a great Lord Chancellor? A Commanding officer ripping khaki off his back? de Valera? the King of Greece? Even the man that made the motors? The range is telling: law, war, nationalist politics, monarchy, and industry—institutions that claim to run history. The speaker’s response, Ach, call me what you please!, carries a shrugging Irish sting: these titles are costumes others want to pin on him. He refuses to be legible in the usual civic categories.

One string against the whole modern orchestra

What he chooses instead is comically small: a Montenegrin lute with an old sole string. That detail matters because it makes the poem’s alternative feel deliberately underpowered—no grand instrument for a grand man. Yet the speaker insists this near-ruined object Makes me sweet music. The tension tightens here: how can a single string answer the scale of what ailed the world? The poem’s answer is not that art replaces politics, but that it preserves a kind of wholeness—sweet—that the speaker watched the ruling world systematically lose.

Avalon as compensation, and as indictment

The refrain, Tall dames go walking in Avalon, reads at first like pure pastoral glamour—green grass, elegant women, a mythic elsewhere. But it also stings as a critique of the speaker’s old milieu. The ladies of great houses were part of the system where Riches drove out human worth; the ladies of Avalon are not consumers or gatekeepers but figures in a story the singer controls. In that sense, Avalon is compensation: he replaces a social order that shrank him with an imagined order that enlarges him. Yet it’s also an indictment, because it implies the real world has become so corrupt that only legend can hold the standards real society has dropped.

The holiday that looks like a masquerade

The final stanza parades a ragged, theatrical figure: patched shoes, a ragged bandit cloak, a hat out of fashion, a monkey on a chain, and even a strutting turkey walk. This is the opposite of the dignified statesman; it’s closer to a street performer or folk trickster, someone who lives by spectacle and improvisation. Yet the body is described as both comic and commanding—an eye like a hawk, a stiff straight back. The poem holds a contradiction without resolving it: the speaker’s chosen freedom looks like self-mockery, but it also looks like a new kind of authority, an authority earned by refusing the false seriousness of the powerful.

A sharper question the poem won’t put down

If Some knew what ailed the world and stayed silent, is the singer’s withdrawal a moral correction—or another kind of silence dressed up as music? The poem makes the lute’s old sole string sound like courage, but the repeated return to Avalon also suggests a seductive loop, a place you can keep walking in forever while history keeps happening elsewhere.