The Stare's Nest by My Window
Meditations In Time Of Civil War
The Stare's Nest by My Window - context Summary
During the Irish Civil War
Written amid the Irish Civil War and published in 1923 within Meditations in Time of Civil War, the poem places a quiet domestic speaker against distant violence. Yeats contrasts a crumbling home and the repetitive appeal to bees with reports of killing, a dead young soldier, and barricades. The poem records uncertainty, communal brutality, and exhausted affections, offering a restrained meditation on how civil strife erodes intimacy and moral clarity.
Read Complete AnalysesThe bees build in the crevices Of loosening masonry, and there The mother birds bring grubs and flies. My wall is loosening; honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare. We are closed in, and the key is turned On our uncertainty; somewhere A man is killed, or a house burned, Yet no clear fact to be discerned: Come build in he empty house of the stare. A barricade of stone or of wood; Some fourteen days of civil war; Last night they trundled down the road That dead young soldier in his blood: Come build in the empty house of the stare. We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare; More Substance in our enmities Than in our love; O honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.
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