“To a Shade” Summary

“To a Shade” Themes

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  Service, Sacrifice, and Ingratitude

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• 

  Life's Sorrows vs. Death's Serenity

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “To a Shade”

• Lines 1-3

  If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
  Whether to look upon your monument
  (I wonder if the builder has been paid)

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 4-7

  Or happier-thoughted when the day is spent
  To drink of that salt breath out of the sea
  When grey gulls flit about instead of men,
  And the gaunt houses put on majesty:

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 8-9

  Let these content you and be gone again;
  For they are at their old tricks yet.

  

  

  

  

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• Between Lines 9-10, Lines 10-14

  A man
  Of your own passionate serving kind who had brought
  In his full hands what, had they only known,
  Had given their children's children loftier thought,
  Sweeter emotion, working in their veins
  Like gentle blood, has been driven from the place,

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 15-18

  And insult heaped upon him for his pains,
  And for his open-handedness, disgrace;
  Your enemy, an old foul mouth, had set
  The pack upon him.

  

  

  

  

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• Between Lines 18-19, Lines 19-22

  Go, unquiet wanderer,
  And gather the Glasnevin coverlet
  About your head till the dust stops your ear,
  The time for you to taste of that salt breath
  And listen at the corners has not come;

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 23-24

  You had enough of sorrow before death—
  Away, away! You are safer in the tomb.

  

  

  

  

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“To a Shade” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Apostrophe

  

  

  

  

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• Metaphor

  

  

  

  

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• Caesura

  

  

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

  

  

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“To a Shade” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• The town
• Shade
• Your monument
• Happier-thoughted
• Gaunt
• Put on
• They/Their
• A man
• Serving
• Gentle
• Pains
• Open-handedness
• Your enemy
• Unquiet
• Glasnevin coverlet

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “To a Shade”

• Form

• Meter

• Rhyme Scheme

“To a Shade” Speaker

“To a Shade” Setting

Literary and Historical Context of “To a Shade”

More “To a Shade” Resources

• External Resources

  • Responsibilities and Other Poems — Browse the 1916 collection in which "To a Shade" appeared.

  • More on Parnell — Read about the life of Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish leader elegized in "To a Shade."

  • More on Sir Hugh Lane — Read about Sir Hugh Percy Lane and the controversy over his Municipal Gallery, which Yeats alludes to in "To a Shade."

  • The Poet's Life and Work — Read a short biography of Yeats at the Poetry Foundation.

  • Yeats, Nobel Laureate — More facts about Yeats, along with his Nobel Prize citation, at Nobelprize.org.

  • Yeats's Note on the Poem — Read Yeats's own explanation of his defense of Hugh Lane and Charles Parnell, printed in an author's note in the 1916 edition of Responsibilities.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by William Butler Yeats

  • Adam's Curse

  • Among School Children

  • An Irish Airman Foresees his Death

  • A Prayer for my Daughter

  • Byzantium

  • Easter, 1916

  • He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

  • In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz

  • Lapis Lazuli

  • Leda and the Swan

  • Sailing to Byzantium

  • September 1913

  • The Lake Isle of Innisfree

  • The Second Coming

  • The Song of Wandering Aengus

  • The Wild Swans at Coole

  • When You Are Old