Dickens and Yeats's ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’

Abstract

W. B. YEATS's ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ (first published in 1937, included in New Poems (1938)) finds in the arts of Irish portraiture a record of the poet's own, and Ireland's, past. ‘The Municipal Gallery’ is a backwards glance, its purpose to lament the loss while celebrating the lives of figures represented in the Dublin portraits. The paintings offer images, as Yeats suggests, of ‘thirty years’ (1)1 which constitute the ‘approved patterns’ of men and women now departed and whose ‘selfsame excellence’ (32) he cannot bring himself to believe, despite the cyclical nature of history, will return. The final couplet, modulating the poem's personal register into the intimate, is framed, before ‘Under Ben Bulben’, as if an epitaph for Yeats himself: Think where man's glory most begins and ends, And say my glory was I had such friends. (lines 55–6)