“Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.”___
Yeats, from Under Ben Bulben.
Written in August 1938. The English had conquered Ireland in 1170. This is surely one of his greatest triumphs of rhetoric, whatever you feel about its sentiments. You can hear the thunder of hooves in “Hard-riding country gentlemen”. (In the same way, “the livelong summer day to spend”, in another poem, sets up the sound of bees.)
February 23 2012 at 11:46 pm
“That were beaten into the clay” is sometimes given without the definite article, I believe wrongly.