VI, The Stare‟s Nest by My Window

• This poem by WB Yeats is about the vicious effects of violence in the Irish Civil War of 1922-1923. It reads like a diary, with different feelings and events spread over a two-week period: ‘Some fourteen days of civil war’. At one point in the third stanza he refers to ‘last night’. Clearly the poem spans a time period in which he reacts to events and to his ever more desperate feelings.
• This is a poem in which he dreams of nature restoring and healing society after the war. It is a poem in which he turns to nature for hope. In each stanza he makes an emotional plea for the bees to lead the process of rebuilding: ‘Come build in the empty house of the stare.’