"The Stare's Nest by My Window" is the sixth of seven sections of Yeats's poem, "Meditations in Time of Civil War." The civil war was Ireland's in 1922-23, following upon Irish independence from Britain. I've long found compelling this part of the larger poem, with its contrasting emphases on creative domesticity — honey-bees building in a starling's empty nest — and violence abroad in the land. The poem itself compels in the repeated final line of each of its stanzas. Beside enmity, brutality, destruction and killing, there endure as well building, rebuilding, tenderness and love.
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
The year after he completed "Meditations in Time of Civil War" Yeats received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Seventy-two years later the same prize was awarded to his countryman and fellow poet, Seamus Heaney. In his lecture on that occasion in 1995, Heaney reflected on these same stanzas of Yeats:
"I have heard this poem repeated often, in whole or in part, by people of
Ireland over the past twenty-five years, and no wonder, for it is as tender minded towards life itself as St. Kevin was, and as tough-minded about what happens in and to life as Homer. It knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time, but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling that will be hard and retributive, and, on the other hand, the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust."