Poem, Sermon and/or Soliloquy?

  A poem the theorist of Masks wrote in 1913, shows how strategic wearing masks is in a world where art and politics intermingled, fought and often parted company. The Dublin of September 1913 was a city in trouble, yet also a city in motion. Yeats' September 1913, written in the period of the Dublin Lockout has often been appraised as a poem and hardly as a direct speech. For this reason, the present paper will seek to explore this very dimension. It will read the poem as a speech delivered by some pivoting voice, a voice that represents the greedy conduct of money and prayer amass- ing as both rational and pious a kind of behaviour. In doing so, however, this voice commits itself to no final judgement. The deviant motion of the text will therefore be considered in the light of its belonging to two traditions at a time: the sermon and the soliloquy traditions. In the two parts of this article the poet's permanent change of masks will be shown to have contributed to creating a mobile, plural and even vertiginous view of the speaking voice's attitude to the theme of Romantic nationalism the poem seems to appraise. This strategy will be shown to have spared Yeats the trouble of judgement.