W. B. Yeats wrote "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz" after the deaths of two former friends and fellow revolutionaries. Eva and her older sister Constance were, like Yeats, leading figures in the fight for Irish independence from British colonial rule—and for an Ireland that had its own cultural and literary traditions, distinct from those imposed on it by Britain.
Gore-Booth died of cancer in 1926, and Markievicz in 1927 from complications that arose during an appendicitis operation. Grieving these losses, Yeats alludes to their youth at "Lissadell," the Gore-Booth estate where the women were raised, and where he sometimes vacationed. He recalls "The light of evening" streaming through the "Great windows open to the south," and he pictures "Two girls in silk kimonos, both / Beautiful," one of whom he compares to "a gazelle." This metaphor suggests a beauty, elegance, and wildness that he clearly found enchanting. The poem's soft, romantic opening evokes Yeats's nostalgia for the girls these women once were, and for the time they shared together as idealistic, impassioned young people.
Yeats sets the elegiac tone of this opening in part through alliteration and consonance, especially an abundance of lilting /l/ sounds:
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
These fluid /l/s help evoke the beauty and grace of the young women, conveying the idyllic way Yeats still thinks of them all these years later. Strong /b/ alliteration ("both / Beautiful") and /g/ alliteration ("Great," "girls," "gazelle") also add to the musicality of the passage.
The poem as a whole contains 32 lines, which are arranged in two stanzas of different lengths. It uses accentual meter, meaning its lines contain a set number of stressed syllables (four, in this case), but those stressed syllables can occur in any order. Purely accentual meter is more flexible than regular (accentual-syllabic) meter; it allows the speaker greater freedom while still resulting in highly musical verse. Here's how it sounds in the first two lines:
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
The poem also follows an ABBA CDDC EFFE (and so on) rhyme scheme, which sounds subtle and natural in part due to Yeats's frequent use of slant rhymes ("south"/"both," "wreath"/"death," etc.). While many of his contemporaries were abandoning meter and rhyme altogether, Yeats continued to honor old conventions—but kept them fresh by not adhering too rigidly to his own rules.