Please give a detailed explanation about the theme and style used in the poem "The Ballad Of Father Gilligan."

In "The Ballad Of Father Gilligan" by William Butler
Yeats, the style of a "Symbolist" poet with his use of "allusive imagery and symbolic
structures." In essence, Yeats wrote poems that suggested a superficial idea, but
selected words and sentence structure so carefully that a "subliminal" meaning was
forthcoming as well.

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Yeats chose words and assembled them so that in
addition to a particular meaning they suggest other abstract
thoughts...

Yeats made great
use of "symbols"—in all, his poems were rather traditional, though many of his
contemporaries were experimenting with "free verse." As his writing continued throughout
his life, his style changed to a degree using language that was more rigid and
presenting his themes in a more direct manner.

Yeats poetry
as a younger writer concentrated more on "Irish myth and folklore;" his later writing
matured as did the poet, when he started to write about more current issues—at which
point his style changed dramatically.

Yeats writes "The
Ballad of Father Gilligan" in four-line stanzas, which are like paragraphs—in a poem.
The rhyme scheme of the poem is A-B-C-B. In other words,
the first and third lines of the stanza (e.g., "Gilligan" and "beds") do not rhyme, but
the second and fourth lines do (e.g., "day" and "lay."). This same
pattern is seen in the second stanza: "chair and "him" do not rhyme, but "eve" and
"grieve" do. The poem has twelve total stanzas. The title of Yeats' poem uses the word
"ballad" which generally means "song." The word "ballad" actually comes from the French
"balada," which means "to dance." One definition of "ballad," which best seems to
describe Yeats' poem is:

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...a simple narrative poem of folk origin,
composed in short stanzas and adapted for
singing

This poem is not a
song in itself as far as we can see, but the sense of a song can
often come from the meter or rhythm of the poem. The lines move back and forth, between
four stressed syllables per line and three. (The emphasis lies on every other syllable.)
For example:

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'I have no
rest, nor joy, nor
peace,

For
peo-ple die and
die';

And
af-ter cried he,
'God
for-give!

My
bo-dy spake, not
I!'

The
words or parts of words that are bolded indicate the rhythm of the poem. As you speak it
(poems are meant to be spoken aloud), placing stress or emphasis on those bolded
elements gives the poem a rocking motion, like a dance.