ABSTRACT
The publishing history of Yeats’s poem ‘Reprisals’ is among the most curious in all his works. It was written in 1921 at the height of the Black and Tan atrocities in Ireland and sent to The Nation for publication. It was in that English journal that Lady Gregory had publicized the atrocious behaviour of the British forces in Galway. It must have seemed an appropriate place for Yeats to raise his own voice in the republican cause. He agreed, however, to withdraw the poem at Lady Gregory’s request, for she feared it would cause pain to her daughter-in-law, Robert Gregory’s widow, since Gregory is addressed in the poem in terms she could not readily have approved. The poem, contradicting the earlier ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ which had Gregory active in Allied uniform from ‘a lonely impulse of delight’, has the skilled fighter-pilot dying for a cause which has been betrayed by subsequent British behaviour in Ireland, where ‘Half-drunk or whole-mad soldiery/Are murdering your tenants’ and ‘Men that revere your father yet/ Are shot at on the open plain.’ The poem imagines the ghost of Gregory (‘our Sidney and our perfect man’ of ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’) as a revenant forced to second thoughts about the war service he gave the Allies, as he becomes aware of the atrocities at Kiltartan Cross. In ‘An Irish Airman’ Yeats had of course suggested that Gregory’s only true loyalty had been to Kiltartan and its people-‘My country is Kiltartan Cross/ My countrymen Kiltartan poor’—and that no likely outcome of the war could bring them loss/Or leave them happier than before’. In 1921 he dismisses the revenant: ‘Then close your ears with dust and lie/Among the other cheated dead.’
