Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats | Poetry Foundation Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats Writing Ideas Yeats’s poem is a response to the Easter Uprising in Ireland, a rebellion that eventually led to the Irish War for Independence and the Irish Civil War. Think about how the poem commemorates, fails to celebrate, and/or eulogizes the event. Compare it to other poems that treat specific historical moments, such as W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” or Shelley’s “ England in 1819 .” Choose a moment in history to write about and, like Yeats, attempt to invoke the event and its consequences without directly addressing its specifics.What is powerful about the final list of names Yeats includes in the poem’s last stanza? Think about the use of proper names in poems generally: what effect does the appearance of a proper name have on you as a reader? Consult other proper-name poems such as Frank O’Hara’s “ A Step Away from Them ” which also concludes with a list of names. Try writing a poem that likewise includes or features proper names.

In her poem guide, Ange Mlinko notes Yeats’s “trance-inducing metric.” Read the poem aloud a few times to see if you agree. Then, write a poem that induces a state of trance. Think about how rhyme, rhythm, and repetition can create, in to use Yeats’s own words, atmospheres of “alluring monotony” while managing to “hold us waking by variety.” Discussion Questions Part of the poem’s “vagueness,” as critic Ange Mlinko notes, stems from Yeats’s use of formal techniques—rhyme and rhythm—as well as symbolism and allegory. Isolate the poem’s symbols and tease out some of the many registers and meanings at work in them. Some key words and symbols to consider include: stone, stream, rider, dream. The refrain to this poem is one of the most famous in English language poetry. Note each time the refrain appears; how does its circulation through the poem adjust what has come before it and what comes after? What work does the paradox of a “terrible beauty” do in the poem? What are some of the “utterly transformed” or “utterly changed” people, ideas, or states that Yeats depicts?

As Mlinko tells us, Yeats was reluctantly political; how does this poem create a sense of vacillation or uncertainty about the revolution it is addressing? Teaching Tips Yeats is one of the 20th century’s most famous poets. Ask students to think about what they already know (or think they know) about Yeats. This can even be basic information about his country of origin, any famous poems, or lines of poetry they think they’ve encountered. Ask them to consider what contexts they’ve seen his name in and what kinds of ideas and images are associated with him and his poetry: have them treat Yeats as a cultural icon whose meanings often circulate far beyond reference to any individual poem. Ask students to conduct an online scavenger hunt for Yeats-abilia. Can they find five non-poetry websites that use Yeats in some way: either a quote from a poem, an image of Yeats, or reference to his life and work? What kinds of cultural currency does Yeats have now? Where is his “work” appearing and in what contexts? Ask students to think about the use of poetry in popular culture more generally: when are poems used in movies, TV shows, advertising, and music, and to what effect?

Have students read the opening paragraphs of Mlinko’s poem guide. For Mlinko, and many Yeats scholars, “Easter, 1916” is a turning point in Yeats’s work, as he engages with “the Modernist rather than the idyllic Ireland.” Talk about the lifespan of Yeats: what changes were happening in the world between 1865-1939? What might Woolf’s quote mean, and do your students see an equivalent in 20th or 21st century events? (You might ask them to talk about how poets, themselves included, respond to the economic, social, and cultural shifts of our own era.) Have them predict some of the characteristics of “early” and “late” poetry by Yeats. Then break the class into two sides, one for early (pre-1913) and one for late (post-1913) Yeats. Have each side consult the Poetry Foundation archive, anthologies, or other websites to track how Yeats’s poetry changed through his life.

Have students take note of content as well as formal techniques such as rhyme, rhythm, prosody, and use of verse or popular forms (ballads, sonnets, etc.) Easter, 1916 I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will, Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all. Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, A terrible beauty is born. Notes: Discover this poem's context and related poetry, articles, and media. Poet William Butler Yeats: “Easter, 1916” Poem Guide By Ange Mlinko One of the most powerful political poems of the 20th century was written by a man who was ambivalent about politics. William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) began his career under the spell of the late Victorian era . Art in that time was generally more romantic than worldly. The word spell is relevant here: in 1887, Yeats became a Theosophist and an acolyte of Russian occultist Madame Blavatsky. He participated in various spiritualist practices—from séances to automatic writing—for the rest of his life.

His early poems feature his passion for Celtic mythology and Gaelic sagas—as in the widely known lyric poems “ The Lake Isle of Innisfree ” and “ The Song of Wandering Aengus .” Nationalism was widespread in all its forms in Ireland at that time, but Yeats preferred his romantic literary nationalism to the new insurrectionary nationalism of his great love, the actor and activist Maud Gonne. Her beauty attracted him and her zealotry repelled him in equal measure. For the first 45 years of his life, Yeats focused his nationalistic energies on writing plays and songs and collected folk tales about Ireland’s past but wrote little about its complicated present or uncertain future. In middle age, Yeats became disillusioned, or perhaps more attuned to certain realities. As Virginia Woolf pointed out, “human character changed” somewhere around 1913, when Ezra Pound published his imagist manifesto and began work as Yeats’s unofficial secretary—the unstoppable artistic revolutions of Modernism goaded Yeats into a crisis that ultimately resolved into a leaner style and a wider scope.

He wrote the political and personal poem “September 1913,” commemorating the work and death of nationalist friend John O’Leary, which included the refrain “Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, / It's with O'Leary in the grave.” Three years later, Yeats said the poem “sounds old-fashioned now,” just before he began writing “Easter, 1916.” That poem expanded his political engagement and stood as an artistic breakthrough. Its innovation rested in Yeats’s ability to preserve older techniques that gave his verse its power—incantatory rhythm , rhyme , symbolism , and allegory —while engaging frankly with the interplay of personality, history, and politics of the present. The oxymoronic refrain of the poem, “a terrible beauty is born,” entered the language as Shakespeare’s “to be or not to be” or Pope’s “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” did. In “Easter, 1916,” focused so closely on an unsuccessful struggle in Ireland’s fight for independence, Yeats had timeless and universal things to say about it.

The engagement with the Modernist rather than the idyllic Ireland is evident in the first stanza of the poem: I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: … As in Ezra Pound’s “ apparition of these faces in the crowd ” in the Paris metro or Eliot’s London “ city block … trampled by insistent feet / At four and five and six o’clock ,” readers are in the presence of the modern metropolis (for Yeats, it was Dublin). Yeats’s fellow citizens and compatriots (“I have met them …”) emerge from a milieu of buildings and counters and desks to an evening of urban amusement: the clubs where people exchange gossip and repartee, where “motley” means both the entertaining diversions of the city and the court fool’s attire.

Yeats allowed readers to entertain a general “them” for only a few lines; as we will see, four distinct persons will emerge from this crowd of convivial Dubliners. The transformation from ordinary citizen to revolutionary is marked by the refrain that will reverberate through the poem: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” The “change” was the Easter Rising (or Easter Rebellion of 1916) of around a thousand Irish Republicans who wanted to secede from Great Britain and establish an independent Ireland. The insurrection was put down less than a week later, and many of its leaders were swiftly executed by firing squad. Although the original rebellion did not enjoy wide support among the general populace, the ruthlessness of the British response unnerved the Irish and led to the growth of the ultranationalist group Sinn Féin. “I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me,” Yeats said, months later. In the wake of the courts-martial and executions of May 1916, he wrote to Lady Gregory that he was “trying to write a poem.” His simultaneous awe of and ambivalence toward the event are clearly coded in the both title and refrain.

The Easter Rising is a double entendre on the holiday; the “terrible beauty” was “born” during Holy Week, which marks the occasion of Christ’s sacrifice. Hence, the Easter Rising is simultaneously crucifixion and resurrection, reality and archetype . Yeats traced the movement of hard-nosed realism to mythography through the poem. The second stanza elegizes the rebels whom Yeats intimately knew: “that woman” refers to the nationalist politician Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz; “this man” was the poet Patrick Pearse, a leader of the uprising; “his helper and friend” was the poet Thomas MacDonagh; the “drunken, vainglorious lout” was John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s abusive former husband. They were not depicted heroically: Yeats chastised Markievicz for her shrillness and described MacBride as loathsome; the two poets, he observed, might have been better off remaining educators and writers. But in the first stanza, Yeats reluctantly recognized that each “resigned his part / In the casual comedy” of everyday life.

The freedom to pursue individual liberty and happiness—the “casual comedy” of the modern city, in which one pursues love and leisure uninterrupted by political calamity—was rejected to promote collective liberty and happiness. At this point, Yeats shifted into the mythologizing third stanza, comparing the hearts of the revolutionaries to immovable rock: Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all. With its lyrical nature images, this stanza evokes a centuries-old pastoral tradition. The pastoral is meant to convey, above all, the peacefulness of the natural world. But there’s a twist: instead of a landscape of changeless peace, we perceive a landscape in which the natural order encompasses movement and transformation. The unnaturally fixed stone causes violence; it “troubles” the flow of water. It is soulless, that is, “inanimate”; the root of animation—the state of being “full of life”—is in the classical Latin word for soul, anima.

So revolutionaries, in Yeats’s view, seem soulless when they have “one purpose alone”: one ideology, one principle, one goal. Yeats’s stanza enacts a terrible swiftness. The poem’s rhythm is magical and defies classification: I have seen it referred to as free verse, as iambic trimeter , and with its many seven-syllable lines, a trimeter with an unfulfilled tetrameter lurking behind it. He prized poetry that enchants with “metrical forms that seemed old enough to have been sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey.” In his essay “The Symbolism of Poetry” (1900), Yeats explained: The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety, to keep us in that state of perhaps real trance, in which the mind liberated from the pressure of the will is unfolded in symbols. Our inability to pin down his trance-inducing metric is a symptom of its archaic power.

The poem seems to have written itself: the original manuscript shows few revisions until the fourth stanza. It also shows that Yeats first wrote that the shadow of the cloud on the stream is “changed.” By revising it into active voice, Yeats underscores the agency of individual actors in a whole in which “are changed, changed utterly” (italics mine). The parts may be active, but the whole is produced, passively, by this interplay. In a poem about historical destiny, this is significant; it implies that all citizens participate in the production of their destiny, but the outcome is unpredictable. If, as the manuscript shows, Yeats had the most trouble writing the final stanza, it must be because its summary argument is difficult to articulate and even more difficult to digest. It is a lament for the dead. He asks his final, desperate question in three ways: O when may it suffice? … Was it needless death after all? … And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? Yeats is not convinced the sacrifice is worthwhile. There is no definitive end to sacrifices that may be made because change is constant, peace cannot ever be a steady state, and more sacrifice is always a possibility.

This particular sacrifice may have been needless; Great Britain at this moment in 1916 may well have been ready for a long-term diplomatic solution to the Republican conflict. It had suspended Ireland’s bill for Home Rule in 1914 while promising to restore it after the conflicts subsided. Finally, the most horrible question the poet asked was whether “excess of love” for country can hound one to one’s death, reducing honor and glory to mere bewilderment. Yeats banished these terrible considerations with the invocation of a mother uttering her child’s name in the dark. If there is any consolation, it can be only in commemoration. “Our part” reinvokes the comparison of life to drama: various roles, motley costumes, and the “casual comedy” turned tragedy: To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child … I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride … In his Autobiography, Yeats writes about where these lines come from: One day, some old Irish member of Parliament made perhaps his only appearance at a gathering of members.

He recited with great emotion a ballad of his own composition in the manner of Young Ireland, repeating over his sacred names, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, and Owen Roe, and mourning that new poets and new movements should have taken something of their sacredness away. The ballad had no literary merit, but I went home with a troubled conscience; and for a dozen years perhaps, till I began to see the result of our work in a deepened perception of all those things that strengthen race, that trouble remained. I had in mind that old politician as I wrote but the other day— Our part Easter, 1916 - Poems | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

browse poems & poets sign up to receive a new poem-a-day in your inbox sign up poem About this Poem “Easter, 1916” captures Yeats’s reaction to the Easter Rising in Ireland, which took place one hundred years ago today. It was first published in 1920 in his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (The Cuala Press, 1920). W. B. Yeats , 1865 - 1939 I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute to minute they live; The stone's in the midst of all. Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. This poem is in the public domain. This poem is in the public domain. W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats, widely considered one of the greatest poets of the English language, received the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland. Easter 1916 | Shortlist | RTÉ - Poem for Ireland I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. That woman’s days were spent In ignorant good-will, Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live; The stone’s in the midst of all. Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven’s part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse — MacDonagh and MacBride Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, A terrible beauty is born.

25 September 1916 From Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) Macmillan. About the poem Here, Yeats responds to a momentous event in Irish history. The poem is remarkable for many reasons, not least because it shows that Yeats was not afraid to admit that he was wrong about the revolutionaries. Three years earlier, he had angrily denounced the Irish middle-classes for their cautious selfishness and lack of vision, claiming then that ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone’. In May 1916 Yeats began writing this poem, in which he recognised the courage of men and women who fought for Irish freedom. The tone is honest and direct. In a letter to Lady Gregory he spoke of how he ‘had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me’. The phrase ‘vivid faces’, in the opening lines, captures their passion, but Yeats, at first, ‘being certain that they and I/ But lived where motley is worn’ admits that he had thought them foolish, clownish, and enjoyed thinking about how he would mock them when he got to his club. The deliberate repetition of ‘polite meaningless words’ captures Yeats’s initial dismissive stance.

He even refers to the run-up to the Rising as a ‘casual comedy’. The portraits he paints of the individuals in the second stanza – Countess Markievicz, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, John MacBride – are vivid; the powerful phrase ‘terrible beauty’ highlights the complexity of what has happened. The setting is Dublin, its streets, its people; but in the poem’s third section, Yeats describes the natural world of cloud and stream and horse and moor-hens, moor-cocks. This is an image of life’s flux and flow - the stone ‘in the midst of all’ symbolises resistance, persistence and the fanatical heart. The final section begins with a statement: ‘Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart’, a reference to Maud Gonne’s commitment to revolutionary ideals. The men and women of 1916 died for Ireland. It was an exhausting struggle and one which Yeats questioned: ‘Was it needless death after all?’ The Home Rule Bill gave Ireland some independence in 1913 but the Bill was suspended at the outbreak of World War I.

‘Easter 1916’ acknowledges ‘their dream’, how ‘they dreamed and are dead’ and how their legacy will always live on. But he also wonders, ‘what if excess of love/ Bewildered them till they died?’ which is an unsettling question. Maud Gonne told Yeats: ‘I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you &amp; above all it isn’t worthy of the subject’. ‘Easter 1916’ is not only memorable for what Yeats says but also for the way he says it. He is a master craftsman. For example, the date itself - Easter Monday, 1916 - is enshrined within the very shape of the poem on the page: the poem’s four stanzas contain either sixteen or twenty-four lines – 24.4.16. W. B. Yeats Yeats, the eldest of six children, was born on Sandymount Avenue in Dublin on 13 June 1865 and spent his childhood in London and Sligo. At seven he did not know the alphabet and throughout his life his spelling was inconsistent and inaccurate.

At Godolphin School in Hammersmith he was mocked for being Irish. His school report in 1877 placed him twenty-first in a class of thirty-one. The family returned to Dublin when Yeats was sixteen and he attended the Erasmus Smith High School. Interested in science [the other pupils called him ‘the insect collector’] he also began to write poetry. Academically he was too weak to attend Trinity College and enrolled at art college but dropped out. In March 1885 he published two poems and, urged by John O’Leary, he joined the Young Ireland Society that same year. When he was twenty-one he published his first volume. Back in London Yeats worked as a reviewer, wrote his most famous poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and at twenty-three met and fell in love with English-born, Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, an event he describes as ‘the troubling of my life’. He first proposed to her in 1891 and was refused. In 1896 Yeats met Lady Gregory who became an enormous influence and, together with Edward Martyn, they founded the Abbey Theatre, which opened on 27 December 1904.

Coole Park, Lady Gregory’s home, also became hugely important. For over thirty years Yeats spent his summers there. Maud Gonne’s husband John MacBride was executed in 1916. Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne again. Later he proposed to Iseult, Maud Gonne’s daughter with a French journalist, who also declined to marry him. On being refused, the fifty-two year old Yeats asked twenty-four year old English woman Georgie Hyde Lees to marry him. They had met in 1911, were married in London in 1917, had two children, lived in Oxford and London, and later moved to Dublin and Thoor Ballylee, a Norman Tower, near Gort. In 1922 Yeats was appointed to the Irish Senate of the Free State Government and in 1923 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature which he described as an honour ‘not given to me as an individual but as a representative of a literary movement and of a nation and I am glad to have it so’. In old age Yeats and his family spent time in Rapallo in Italy.

He gave a lecture tour in America to raise money for an Irish Academy of Letters, and underwent, at sixty-nine, a Steinach rejuvenation operation which supposedly restored sexual potency. It certainly liberated his imagination and his late poems are among his best work. He died in 1939, aged seventy-three, in Roquebrune in the south of France. Yeats was buried there, but in 1948 his remains were exhumed and brought to Sligo. He was buried at Drumcliff church where a great-grandfather had been a clergyman. On his gravestone he commanded that ‘these words are cut’: Cast a cold eye Yeats - Easter 1916 Return to the introduction by David Barber. Hear Davison, Levine, and Wilbur read their own poems from The Atlantic's pages in An Audible Anthology Go to Atlantic Unbound's Poetry Pages From The Atlantic's archives: "All Ireland's Bard," by Seamus Heaney (November, 1997) "Tied by birth to unionism, memorialist of the executed Nationalist rebels of 1916, W. B.

Yeats mirrored Ireland's divisions in his self-divisions -- yet saw the island as a single cultural entity sprung from common roots in common myths." "William Butler Yeats," by Louise Bogan (May, 1938) "Yeats has advanced into age with his art strengthened by a long battle which had as its object a literature written by Irishmen fit to take its place among the noble literatures of the world. The spectacle of a poet's work invigorated by his lifelong struggle against the artistic inertia of his nation is one that would shed strong light into any era." Discuss the poem and readings in the Arts & Literature forum of Post & Riposte . I I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

II That woman's days were spent In ignorant good will, Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When young and beautiful, This man had kept a school And rode our winged horse. This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vain-glorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. III Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter, seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute change. A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim; And a horse plashes within it Where long-legged moor-hens dive And hens to moor-cocks call.

Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all. IV Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death. Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead. And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse -- MacDonagh and MacBride Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Easter 1916 - Modernism Lab Essays Easter 1916 by Nathan Suhr-Sytsma On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916 , members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army occupied Dublin’s General Post Office, and from its steps, Patrick Pearse read a proclamation of the Irish Republic.

The British military responded with force, and the Easter Rising, as it became known, came to an end with the rebels’ surrender on April 29. In England at the time, W. B. Yeats learned about the Rising mostly through newspapers and through letters from his friend and patroness, Lady Gregory. As the British forces imposed martial law and, in early May, executed fifteen of the Rising’s leaders, some of whom Yeats knew personally, the events in Ireland moved Yeats to begin writing the poem which became “Easter, 1916.” On May 11, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory that he had received a letter from his long-time muse Maud Gonne, who had written from France with the belief that the revolutionaries had “raised the Irish cause again to a position of tragic dignity” (White 372). He went on to relate his own attempts to interpret recent events: “I am trying to write a poem on the men executed—‘terrible beauty has been born again.’” (Wade 613).

The phrase “terrible beauty,” with its initial “t” and final “ty,” seems to echo Gonne’s “tragic dignity,” though the negatively charged “terrible” strains against “beauty,” making Yeats’s phrase more ambivalent than Gonne’s. Yeats may not have used the word “tragic,” but a sense of tragedy pervades “Easter, 1916.” Recalling life before the Rising in the poem’s opening stanza, the speaker confesses that he had imagined Dublin worthy only of comedy or farce, a place in which he concocted “a mocking tale or a gibe” since he “But lived where motley”—the costume of a jester—“is worn.” Likewise, the poet has imagined Gonne’s estranged husband, Major John MacBride (the “drunken, vainglorious lout” of the poem’s second stanza) capable only of a part “In the casual comedy.” The poem implies, however, that MacBride and the other leaders have been changed by the Rising, more specifically, by being executed for their participation in it, from comic actors into tragic martyrs.

The “terrible beauty” of revolutionary violence and its ongoing repercussions have launched these men into a serious role in history. MacBride’s death left Maud Gonne unmarried, and after visiting Ireland in early June to witness the aftermath of the Rising, Yeats spent the summer with Gonne in Normandy, France. The fact that he worked on “Easter, 1916” while trying to woo her creates audible erotic resonances in the poem. On the one hand, the poem’s incantatory commemoration of the rebel leaders must have appealed to Gonne’s passionately nationalist politics. On the other hand, the third and fourth stanzas of the poem appeal to those like her, “Hearts with one purpose alone,” not to let those hearts become “a stone,” insensitive to the peace and flux of nature. In the natural world, “The long-legged moor-hens dive, / And hens to moor-cocks call,” acting out an erotic give-and-take, but in the political realm, “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.

/ O when may it suffice?” The poem seems to express Yeats’s anxiety that Gonne, like the leaders of the Easter Rising, might choose to sacrifice the erotic to the political. Back in Ireland with Lady Gregory, Yeats finally finished a draft of “Easter, 1916” on September 25, but Gonne was not taken with it. Her letter to Yeats begins, “My dear Willie, No I don’t like your poem” (White 384). She was not willing, perhaps, to grant the ambivalent value that the poem attributes to sacrifice in general and to that of the Rising’s leaders in particular. Yeats chose not to publish “Easter, 1916” in a periodical or in his next book, The Wild Swans at Coole, likely because the poem would have been seen in England as unpatriotic and thus endangered his friendships, literary contacts, and perhaps even his government pension. His situation was especially delicate since he and Lady Gregory hoped to persuade England’s National Gallery to return Hugh Lane’s collection of paintings to Dublin (Foster 64).

He waited to publish “Easter, 1916” until the fall of 1920, when the Anglo-Irish war was at its height and Terence MacSwiney, the Sinn Féin mayor of Cork, was on a hunger strike in prison. Willing now to make a political gesture on behalf of Ireland, Yeats gave the poem to the New Statesman, which had been sympathetic to MacSwiney, where it appeared on Oct. 23, 1920 before being included in his 1921 volume, Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Given the historic events behind it, “Easter, 1916” not only meditates on time and history, but also subtly embodies a tension between day-to-day life and the seemingly higher time of history; it puts forward what Terence Brown calls “two orders of time” (233).

On the one hand, the poem dramatizes the ordinary passage of time, in which Dubliners wander home from work “at close of day” and Constance Markievicz spends her “days” and “nights.” On the other hand, it registers a sense that participants in the Rising—and perhaps, by implication, all of Ireland—have been caught up into a new time, one in which “A terrible beauty is born” in the eternal present. Moreover, as the poem consists of four alternating stanzas of sixteen and twenty-four lines, suggesting the 24th day in the 4th month (April) of 1916, it encodes the date of the Easter Rising in its very structure. [1] By reenacting this date whenever it is read, the poem implies that both the Rising and Yeats’s commemoration of it belong to a higher time marked by quasi-liturgical return.

Having translated the Rising’s leaders into a tragic mode and registered his ambivalence toward their nationalist sacrifice, Yeats ends “Easter, 1916” with an overt gesture toward his own role in establishing mythic history: I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. ↑ Helen Vendler reports that her student Nathan Rose pointed this out to her. See Helen Vendler, “Technique in the Earlier Poems of Yeats,” Yeats Annual 8 (1991): 20. For a more extended reading of the poem, see Helen Vendler, Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 16-26. Works Cited: Brown, Terence. The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1999. Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats: A Life. Vol. II. The Arch-Poet.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Wade, Allen, ed. The Letters of W. B. Yeats. London: Rubert Hart-Davis, 1954. White, Anna MacBride and A. N. Jeffares, ed. Always Your Friend:The Gonne-Yeats Letters, 1893-1938. London: Hutchison, 1992. A terrible beauty: the poetry of 1916 By using this website, you consent to our use of cookies. For more information on cookies see our Cookie Policy .

X A terrible beauty: the poetry of 1916 Mairéad Ashe FitzGerald explores the cultural legacy of the Easter Rising in the work of the rebels themselves and fellow poets Yeats, AE, James Stephens and Francis Ledwidge Wed, Aug 19, 2015, 08:00 Mairéad Ashe FitzGerald Pádraic Pearse: his poem The Rebel has all the power of the consummate leader who longed to see his country freed Joseph Plunkett: It was in poetry and in song that the rebel, the subversive, the dispossessed, found expression for dreams of nationhood and freedom Previous Image Poetry had a long history of living underground in the Gaelic tradition, so it was little wonder that three young poets, Pádraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett, were among those who walked out on Easter Monday morning 1916 to set their country free. It was in poetry and in song that the rebel, the subversive, the dispossessed, found expression for dreams of nationhood and freedom.

Pearse’s poem The Rebel has all the power of the consummate leader who longed to see his country freed: I am come of the seed of the people, the people that sorrow, That have no treasure but hope, No riches laid up but a memory Of an Ancient glory. They were heady days for the young and the idealistic in those early years of the twentieth century when Ireland was gearing up for nationhood. There was a prevailing atmosphere of renewal and youth, and people of vision and energy such as Pearse, MacDonagh and Plunkett were all part of a life-giving movement devoted to saving and promoting Irish culture. They wrote plays, founded theatres, edited papers and journals, as well as teaching and organising cultural events. The artist Sarah Purser observed that they were all like a stage army marching round and round, acting every part required of them. Furthermore, the authorities ignored or were blind to the ferment of nationalism and commitment to the cause of freedom that was building up before their eyes. When I was invited by O’Brien Press to compile an anthology of the poetry of 1916, I thought of the poems by the young leaders of the Rising, many of them well known from our schoolbooks.

Who doesn’t recall Joseph Mary Plunkett’s I See His Blood upon the Rose? I see his blood upon the rose, And in the stars the beauty of his eyes, ADVERTISEMENT His body gleams upon eternal snows, His tears fall from the skies. Or the austerely beautiful Mise Éire by Pádraic Pearse?

‘Mise Éire: Sine mé ná an Chailleach Bhéarra.’ And his translation: ‘I am Ireland: / I am older than the old woman of Beare.’ Pearse’s final poem was a work of peace and beauty written as a farewell to life after the turmoil of the Rising while awaiting execution in Kilmainham Gaol: The beauty of the world hath made me sad, This beauty that will pass; Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy To see a leaping squirrel in a tree, Or a red ladybird upon a stalk … And Thomas MacDonagh, of whom WB Yeats was to write, “He might have won fame in the end, / So sensitive his nature seemed, /So daring and sweet his thought”, was he outlining the qualities he aspired to for himself in his poignant poem to his new-born son, Donogh, Wishes for My Son?: God to you may give the sight And the clear undoubting strength Wars to knit for single right, Freedom’s war to knit at length, And to win, through wrath and strife, To the sequel of my life.

The Easter Rising resulted in the executions of 16 leaders, most of them young, and their burial without ceremony generated an outpouring of poetry. Written by almost every poet who took part in the literary revival, these poems gave words to the depth of pride, anger, grief and identity growing among the people. James Stephens’s beautiful elegy, Spring – 1916, is a fine tribute to those whose lives were so abruptly ended: Be green upon their graves, O happy Spring! For they were young and eager who are dead! Of all things that are young, and quivering With eager life, be they rememberéd! These poems must have spoken directly to the comrades of the fallen and added to the awakening sense of freedom growing among the general population. Francis Ledwidge wrote: A noble failure is not vain, But hath a victory its own. A bright delectance from the slain Is down the generations thrown. AE, George Russell , saw the Rising as “the confluence of dreams/ That clashed together in our night”. His poem Salutation, a moving tribute, demonstrates his personal admiration for Pearse, MacDonagh and their companions despite his reservations over their actions in Easter Week 1916.

AE had known them all and like Yeats and others he threaded their names through the poems he wrote in the aftermath of the Rising. Here’s to you, Pearse, your dream not mine, And yet the thought for this you fell Has turned life’s waters into wine. AE, himself a central figure in the cultural and economic life of the country, while not sharing in Pearse’s dream, was a sympathetic observer: Their dream has left me numb and cold, But yet my spirit rose in pride, Refashioning in burnished gold The images of those who died Or were shut in the penal cell. It is worth noting that AE did not forget those “shut in the penal cell” in the aftermath of the Rising with their leaders executed and their hopes lost. I like to think that at least some of these poems (censorship was in full force at the time) were circulated among those who were rounded up, courtmartialled in the aftermath of the Rising and held in prison in England. Francis Ledwidge, a member of the Volunteers before joining up, ill in hospital on leave from the trenches of the Great War, was devastated by news of the executions of so many he had known.

His beautiful Lament for Thomas MacDonagh must have spoken directly to those comrades who had known him: ADVERTISEMENT He shall not hear the bittern cry In the wild sky, where he is lain, Nor voices of the sweeter birds Above the wailing of the rain. Nor shall he know when loud March blows Thro’ slanting snows her fanfare shrill, Blowing to flame the golden cup Of many an upturned daffodil. Those left behind were already gearing up for the next challenge, fighting elections from within the prison walls, struggling with the ravages of illness, working to reverse hostile public opinion. Constance Markievicz was one of these, and her sister Eva Gore-Booth, (“who did not share their strife, /And mourned that any blood was shed”) wrote a poem for her, entitled Comrades: The peaceful night that round me flows, Breaks through your iron prison doors, Free through the world your spirit goes, Forbidden hands are clasping yours. The horror of the executions following the Rising was protracted through the long-drawn-out trial of Roger Casement and brought further time for reflection on the loss of all that youth and hope.

Throughout that summer of 1916 the trial went on in London alongside a campaign for Casement’s reprieve. It came to a heartrending conclusion with his execution by hanging and burial in Pentonville Jail in August. With the death of Casement, “the last of the executions, some part of our youth died,” wrote Mary Colum, the Irish writer and critic. Her husband, the poet Padraic Colum, wrote a lament entitled The Rebel to honour him. Eva Gore-Booth, a lifelong campaigner for social justice and a poet of great sincerity wrote: I dream of the peace in his soul, And the early morning hush on the grave of a hero In the desolate prison yard. (Indeed, her words could equally apply to the fate of Thomas Kent, summarily tried, executed and buried in an unmarked grave in Cork Jail immediately after the Rising.) Dora Sigerson Shorter, so deeply affected by grief that her friend Katharine Tynan believed it caused her early death, wrote a collection of elegies in the aftermath of the Rising, Poems of the Irish Rebellion, one for each of the executed leaders.

Pearse she described as “Lover of birds and flowers, singer of gentle songs,/Dying with men of war”. Pearse and his companions, of course, had at a stroke joined the romantic heroes of revolutions past. The American journalist and poet Joyce Kilmer, who was Joseph Plunkett’s friend, had a remarkable grasp of Irish revolutionary history and wrote an extensive article on the Rising in the magazine of The New York Times, “Poets March in the Van of Irish Revolt”. His poem, Easter Week In Memory of Joseph Mary Plunkett , places Pearse squarely in the company of the mythic heroes: Lord Edward leaves his resting place And Sarsfield’s face is glad and fierce, See Emmet leap from troubled sleep To grasp the hand of Pádraic Pearse! For WB Yeats, now in his fifties, sceptical and distant from nationalist politics, Pearse and his young companions would have been the subject of his “mocking tale or gibe/To please a companion/ Around the fire at the club”.

But by May 1916, the idea of a changing national landscape was germinating in his mind, and over the summer he worked on his long, complex poem, Easter 1916. This poem is Yeats’s great rendering of the transforming events of the Rising, and the elegiac closing passage with its incantatory undercurrent, murmuring “name upon name”, recognises the significance of the moment and shapes a vision of what was to come. I write it out in a verse – MacDonagh and MacBride Literature and 1916 | Century Ireland Handbook of the Irish Revival, edited by PJ Matthews and Declan Kiberd, recently published by the Abbey Theatre Press Photo: Abbey Theatre Press Literature and 1916 pj matthews One of the enduring ideas about the 1916 Rising is that it was a ‘poets’ revolt’. This may be partly to do with the fact the most famous statement about the event is, itself, a poem.

Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’ gave us the unforgettable refrain ‘A terrible beauty is born’ but it also portrayed leaders like Pearse and MacDonagh as cultured men of letters as well as revolutionaries. There is no doubt that poetry and theatre played a huge role in the events that led to the Easter Risin g but it is unlikely that any of the Volunteers who saw action on Easter week signed up for combat solely because they read patriotic poems or attended nationalist plays. Actor Lisa Dwan performs W.B Yeats ‘Easter 1916’ on this film to launch the National Library of Ireland’s 2016 programme It is true that many of the leading figures were deeply interested in culture: Patrick Pearse was a writer and an important figure in the Gaelic League; Thomas MacDonagh lectured in English literature at UCD and wrote poetry; and Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh was a central figure in the shaping of the Irish theatre movement. They came of age in a city where experimental art was being created, new theatres were being opened, and a new enthusiasm for the Irish language was finding expression.

The pubs and tearooms bristled with energy as people debated the themes and controversies of the latest literary magazines. W.B. Yeats (left) and Lady Gregory (right) who wrote the revolutionary play, Cathleen Ni Houlihan. (Images: Library of Congress and Illustrated London News) Cathleen Ni Houlihan The production of the revolutionary play, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory is often cited as a moment when ideas of romantic nationalism radicalised a generation of rebels who would end up in the GPO in 1916. There is no mistaking the political message behind this drama. The old woman, Cathleen (an allegorical figure who represents Mother Ireland), has lost her four green fields and appeals to a young man to help her get them back. The hero, Michael, is moved by this story and leaves his bride-to-be to help the old woman. As he leaves, Cathleen is transformed into a beautiful young woman ‘with the walk of a queen’. This influential play of the early Irish theatre movement was produced in St Teresa’s Hall in Clarendon Street on 2 April 1902.

It marked the beginning of a groundbreaking collaboration between a talented band of part-time actors under the direction of Frank and Willie Fay, and the playwrights of the Irish Literary Theatre. Starring Maud Gonne in the title role, it was a huge popular success and was revived many times in the years leading up to 1916. In fact the play was performed at the Abbey just weeks before the Rising. Set near Killala, Co. Mayo, it recalls the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798 and blends ideas of Fenian revolution with Celtic other-worldliness. The play draws heavily on the Gaelic aisling tradition in which Ireland is personified as a woman. As is often pointed out, this is a rather disabling notion of female possibility. The only option open to the female character in this instance is to inspire male heroic action. There is something paradoxical, however, in the fact that the actress who played the lead role, Maud Gonne, was anything but a passive woman at this time. She was a leading advocate for women’s rights, a defender of the poor and an important figure in artistic circles.

It is instructive, however to look at what else was happening at the time Cathleen Ni Houlihan was written. It is obvious that Yeats and Lady Gregory wrote it as a way of counteracting the appeal of the British monarchy in Ireland. The visits of kings and queens were often greeted with enthusiasm by a large proportion of the Irish people. Many welcomed the celebratory occasion and relished the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the king or queen. Yeats, however, was vocal in his objection to royal visits. He pointed out that in Ireland public displays of loyalty were often followed by protracted periods of revolutionary action against the Crown. Royal visits, it seems, could unmask the rigid hierarchies underpinning the ruling system. A scene from Cathleen Ni Houlihan from a production in 1912. (Image: Irish Plays and Playwrights by Cornelius Weygandt (1913) via Internet Archive) It was largely to neutralise the mystique of the British monarch with an Irish equivalent, that he and Lady Gregory exhumed the old Gaelic sovereignty goddess, Cathleen Ni Houlihan.

This figure embodied the nation in the form of a woman (as Queen Victoria did in Britain) who could inspire the loyalty of the people, and the bravery of young men. When the ageing Victoria came to Dublin in 1900 her mission to recruit young Irishmen to fight in the Boer War was widely commented upon. Cathleen Ni Houlihan was performed on the Dublin stage shortly afterwards to remind Irishmen of their duty to reclaim the sovereign nation. Yeats had this play in mind when he later wrote the lines ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’ It was much parodied by post-independence writers such as Sean O’Casey and Denis Johnston who regarded it as the apotheosis of a dangerous, unthinking nationalism. P.J. Matthews, Barry Barnes & Cathy Belton look at Ireland in the early phases of the Literary Revival on 'Today with Sean O'Rourke' Signatories of the Proclamation in poetry and drama The themes of stoic idealism and mystical sacrifice can also be found in the poetry of Patrick Pearse.

His poem, ‘Fornocht Do Chonac Thú’ (‘Naked I Saw Thee’), reiterates the idea of self-denial found in Cathleen Ni Houlihan and, eerily, anticipates Pearse’s own death. Once again, the turning away from earthly delights is seen as a necessary precursor to heroic action. Joseph Mary Plunkett ’s most famous poem, ‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’ is more overtly Christian in tone. It embraces the mystical idea of the incarnation of Jesus in the beauty of the natural world. In contrast to Pearse, the note of self-denial is not so pronounced. If anything, the poem endorses the idea of Christian fulfilment in this life as well as the next. Plunkett’s friend and fellow signatory of the Proclamation, Thomas MacDonagh, was more secular in his thought. His play, Metempsychosis, a comedy performed by the Theatre of Ireland in 1912 is very revealing in this regard. Significantly, in the light of MacDonagh’s subsequent execution in 1916, the play stands as a firm critique of martyrdom to an abstract principle.

In fact it pointedly satirises the wilful, conscious ending of a life for the sake of some intangible ideal or sense of a higher plan. Furthermore, it exposes to ridicule those who proffer such ideas to others but are unwilling to follow such deathly doctrines themselves. The mystical strain in poetry and drama is a discernable tone in the literary soundscape of the period. However, it is hardly the dominant note. Critics of the Rising often zeroed in on this element after the fact to claim that the rebellion was spearheaded by a group of crazed religious fanatics with a militarist death wish. It also suited the agenda of an ascendant conservative elite who were eager to claim the Rising in the name of the Catholic faith. In reality most of the leading figures were deeply committed civic activists rather than tortured romantic souls. Many, too, were important leaders in the re-emergence of enlightenment values of civic participation and citizenship that revolutionised Irish life in the decades prior to 1916. During this period people gathered in their thousands in meeting rooms and parish halls all over Ireland to create a new civic culture outside the scope of institutional religion, the colonial state and conventional politics.

The 1916 generation led a whole range of clubs, leagues, and societies, dedicated to nationalism, fenianism, women’s suffrage, socialism, republicanism, anti-conscriptionism, Irish language revivalism and trade unionism. Significantly, many of the leading figures also contributed to influential publications like the Irish Review, founded in 1911 by Mary Colum and others. This robust and energetic journal combined an interest in literary and cultural matters with social theory and critique. It was a melting pot of ideas on republicanism, female suffrage and the rights of children — many of which would find their way into the 1916 Proclamation. The 1916 Proclamation which was a melting pot of ideas on republicanism, female suffrage and the rights of children. Click to enlarge. (Image: National Library of Ireland) What is most striking, however, is the speed with which cultural and intellectual energies and activities across the networks of activism transformed into military organisation in response to the Home Rule crisis of 1912 and in the context of a militarist zeitgeist sweeping Europe at the outbreak of the First World War .

People who had previously gathered to discuss literary matters and political issues were now running guns and taking part in military manoeuvres. Others were volunteering to fight in the trenches. There is no question that an interest in literature and theatre brought many like-minded people of radical intent together in the years preceding the Rising. It is doubtful, however, that abstract devotion to Cathleen Ni Houlihan was a major factor in the unfolding events. The actions of Easter 1916 were initiated by men and women who regarded themselves as equal citizens but who, paradoxically, lacked elected authority. These actions were justified in their minds by the fact that in Ireland no elected national authority was permitted to exist, or could come into being, without the use of force. Dr P.J. Mathews is a Senior Lecturer in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film. He is the co-editor (with Declan Kiberd) of Handbook of the Irish Revival, recently published by Abbey Theatre Press. RELATED CONTENT Ireland 32 From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses." Kearney asserts that Yeats's use of "is" rather than "was" at the end of stanza one, forewarns of the tragic conflict to come.

According to Kearney, Yeats emphasizes a central theme to the poem, that "beauty is the offspring of terror." Horrific beauty is the offspring of terror, "born" not once, but something to be perpetually 'reborn' now and in times to come: "All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." In the second stanza Yeats publicly apologizes and expresses his new-found respect for the middle-class. The author is compelled to revise his earlier ideas expressed in " September 1913." Yeats pays humble tribute to the executed leaders as he one by one establishes their place in history. Of Pearse, a poet, writer and the head of St.

Edna's, and MacDonagh, denied an opportunity to earn his own role as an Irish writer, by his untimely death, Yeats writes: "This man had kept a school and rode our winged horse; This other his helper and friend, Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought." Although Yeats cannot forget MacBride's shortcomings and brutal treatment of Maude Gonne, he begrudgingly admits that the heroic sacrifice redeems any clown that has "resigned his part" in the "casual comedy" of Irish life: "This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song;" Yeats withholds any kind words for Constance Markiewicz, who by her exalted origin, escaped the executioner's hand. The author chooses rather to look fondly on her earlier aristocratic days before she lost her innocent sweetness to the political cause and took up with the middle-class mob: "That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will, Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers?" In the third stanza Yeats uses imagery to establish two opposing concepts, one of life, full of dynamic and constant change, and its counterpart, a lifeless embedded rock. Here Yeats begins to disclose the downside of the heroics and blood sacrifice of Easter Week. Yeats compares their single-minded devotion for the cause of Irish freedom, to a stone unaffected by the sights, sounds and beauty of ever-changing nature. " Hearts with one purpose alone" become the eternal antagonist "To trouble the living stream." All is meaningless to hearts that reject all of life's little pleasures, but possess one reason only to beat onward: "Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream." David Lloyd's essay, The Poetics of Politics: Yeats and the Founding of the State helps to explain the paradox of the poem that begins to reveal itself in the second and third stanzas. The transformation of middle-class citizens into martyrs, and the political gains achieved through their heroic deaths, results in a troubled tension.

The "living stream" of pragmatism faces an endless conflict with the symbolic "stone" of single- minded devotion to Irish nationalism. Yeats leaves no doubt that the "stone" has permanently altered the course of Irish history. The "stone" remains implanted "in the midst of all." Paradoxically, the ideology that gave birth to the Irish Free State, also anchored Irish nationalists to one rigid and unyielding political objective, a free and independent United Ireland. Consequently, the "stone" in the "living stream" represents a double status obliged to subsequent questioning of the rebellion's role in Irish history. In the closing stanza of the poem, Yeats begins to inject sceptism, and possibly criticism into his commemorative poem. "Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart." Using Pearse's own phrase "Excess of love" Yeats asks: "And what if excess of love bewildered them till they died?" Yeats implies, as most revisionists do, that England may have come through with Home Rule at the close of World War I, and wonders: "Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith For all that is done and said." Yet, Yeats's admiration for the rebels' deed seems untainted by any sense of an unnecessary loss of life. In his tribute to the rebel leaders, Yeats omits the name of Lady Markiewicz. He adds instead, James Connolly, second-in-command of the rebellion and later executed. Yeats extends to them an eternal place in Irish history: "I write it out in a verse - MacDonagh and MacBride Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." Yeats's final opinion of the rebellion remains a subject for debate even today.

In an essay titled, "What Stalked through the Post Office?" Augustine Martin writes that Yeats's position on Irish nationalism vacilitated for most of his life, he had no " single idea of revolution." What began as a simple but romantic vision of an Ireland redeemed by blood sacrifice in Cathleen ni Houlihan, at the turn of the century, moves on to break with the Young Ireland movement in his tortured but commemorative testament, "Easter 1916." Later, Yeats shifts to celebrate the physical force tradition in "The Rose Tree" then ultimately gives a direct tribute to the rebel leaders in "Sixteen Men Dead." John Unterecker, author of A Reader's Guide To William Butler Yeats, believes that "Yeats never abandoned his notion of the heroic sacrifice of that Easter Rising" . However, Unterecker adds that Yeats believed the movement itself had " fallen into disorder; the mob, greedy opportunists, corrrupted the men and women who fought for them." "Easter 1916" and the uprising it commemorates transcend any single idea, event or purpose.

Yeats asks "O when may it suffice?" - seeking an end to the need for any death in pursuit of political gains. Long after the Rising, the cultic sacrifice of Pearse and his comrades retains the power to light the torch of revolutionary republicanism. The rifle and rebel displaced the poet and poet's pen, following the events of Easter Week. The combined contemporary political forces of 1916 including the conservative nationalism of John Redmond, the Home Rule Party and Yeats himself, failed to stem the tide of the rebellion's political and cultural aftermath. The British executions delivered death to the Irish rebels, and simultaneously gave life to a new group of Irish martyrs. Events that spanned just a couple of weeks in 1916, ultimately drove a stake through the heart of constitutionalism nationalism, and Yeats's idea of a romantic, aristocratic Anglo- Irish Ireland. Kearney informs us that shortly after Yeats wrote "Easter 1916," posters emerged around Dublin, paying tribute to the fallen martyrs. One poster depicted Patrick Pearse in a pieta position, supported by a tricolour-waving Mother Erin. The poster's caption read 'All Is Changed'.

The Irish people wasted little time fulfilling Pearse's prediction in his surrender statement to the British authorities, that though the Irish lost their victory in life, "they would win it in death". Irish history after 1916 confirms Yeats' fear of a cultic immortalization of the leaders' blood sacrifice. The middle- class rebels whom Yeats held in such contempt, were responsible for all that was "utterly changed" and the "terrible beauty" that was born. Twelve months before his death, Pearse spoke at the graveside of O'Donovan Rossa. Three-quarters of a century later, his immortalised words represent the heart of Irish republicanism: "life springs from death and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living waters...The fools, the fools, the fools, they have left us our Fenian dead and while Ireland holds these graves Ireland unfree shall never be at peace." The executed patriots did indeed leave behind a legacy. The memory of their sacrifice continues to rise from their graves and inspire future generations to the cult of martyrdom. "Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, A terrible beauty is born." Works Cited Allison, Johathan, ed.

Yeats's Political Identities: Selected Essays. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1996. Unterecker, John. A Reader's Guide To William Butler Yeats. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974. Questions should be directed to Ireland32 at: Ireland32@gmu.edu © International Coalition of Irish American Student Organization Provided by George Mason University's Masonlink

Question: Who wrote the poem 'Easter 1916'?
Answer: W B YEATS