While Yeats’s poem functions without specific historical context as a meditation on death in general, the “great man” mentioned in the poem is a reference to a particular man. The poem was written partly as a response to the assassination of Irish politician Kevin O’Higgins. In order to better understand O’Higgins’s place in both Yeats’s and the Irish imagination, it is important to first grasp the basics of the Irish Civil War. The war, fought in the early 1920s, was a result of many years of tensions between the people and national identity of Ireland and its rule by Britain. Specifically, the war centered on the establishment of what was called the Irish Free State, which made Ireland a semi-independent political entity, though one definitively under the political dominion of the British Commonwealth.

Kevin O’Higgins belonged to the political party Cumann na nGaedheal, which supported the establishment of the Irish Free State and fought against its resistors, the Irish Republican Army (e.g., the IRA). Yeats knew O’Higgins personally and, like him, had grown up with ties to the IRA’s ideological focus on Irish independence before becoming more conservative and supporting British rule.