To A Shade by W.B. Yeats

Ok so, I'm new to this forum, but I have been trying to analyze this poem for days now and I'm having a lot of trouble with it...First of all, I read through it and researched all the words I didn't understand in it and I came to the conclusion that it was about Daniel O'Connell, and Glasnevin was a reference to the cemetery that he helped found, and it all made perfect sense to me. Then I started to find a few writings on the poem, and they said that the person who Yeats is talking about in the poem is Parnell ( I can't remember the first name, sorry). So now I am utterly confused. Can anyone else give me any insight into this poem? As I have found it is one of his lesser known ones, so I will include the poem in this post. Thanks =]


TO A SHADE

by: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

If you have revisited the town, thin Shade,
Whether to look upon your monument
(I wonder if the builder has been paid)
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:
Let these content you and be gone again;
For they are at their old tricks yet.

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,
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.

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

September 29, 1913