The Three Monuments
The Three Monuments - meaning Summary
Mocking Patriotic Self-image
Yeats’s poem satirizes public commemorations and the self-congratulating rhetoric of national leaders. The ‘‘three monuments’’—figures among birds and stumps—stand where patriots gather to praise abstract virtues like purity and intellect as foundations of the State. The poem exposes the hypocrisy and circular logic of such claims, showing how proclaimed virtues mask base ambition and lead instead to pride, while the three “rascals” mock the pretensions of civic rhetoric.
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