Easter, 1916

Yeats struggles to judge the Easter Rising and the leaders executed for it.

Yeats remembers meeting the future rebels on Dublin streets before the Rising, greeting them with "Polite meaningless words" and making jokes about them at his club, sure that they all lived in a comic, trivial world. The Rising has changed that: "A terrible beauty is born." The second stanza sketches four of them: a woman whose voice grew shrill in politics, a schoolmaster poet, his gentle friend, and a man Yeats despised, all transformed. The third stanza turns to an image: hearts fixed on one purpose become a stone in a stream, unmoving among living, changing things. The last stanza asks whether too much sacrifice turns the heart to stone, and whether the deaths were needless. Yeats cannot answer, but he writes out the names of MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly and Pearse, and declares them changed forever.

Line by line

1. Lines 1 to 8Before the Rising

   Yeats remembers meeting the future rebels at the end of the working day, coming "From counter or desk" among Dublin's Georgian houses. He passed them with a nod, or stopped to say "Polite meaningless words", a phrase repeated to show how empty those exchanges were.

2. Lines 9 to 16Where motley is worn

   He even thought up "a mocking tale or a gibe" to amuse friends at the club, sure that Dublin life was a comedy, a place "where motley is worn" like a jester's costume. The refrain overturns everything: "All changed, changed utterly". "A terrible beauty" is an oxymoron that holds horror and awe together.

3. Lines 17 to 23That woman

   The first portrait is of Constance Markievicz, though she is not named. Yeats regrets that her days went in "ignorant good will" and her nights in argument until her voice "grew shrill", and remembers her young and beautiful, riding to hounds. The contrast shows what he felt politics had cost her.

4. Lines 24 to 30The poet and his friend

   Patrick Pearse "had kept a school" and "rode our winged horse": Pegasus, the horse of poetry, since Pearse wrote verse. "This other his helper and friend" is Thomas MacDonagh, poet and teacher, whose "sensitive" nature and "daring and sweet" thought might have "won fame in the end".

5. Lines 31 to 40The drunken lout

   The fourth portrait is of John MacBride, whom Yeats had thought "A drunken, vain-glorious lout" who had done "most bitter wrong" to people close to his heart. Even so, "I number him in the song". He too has left "the casual comedy" and been "Transformed utterly".

6. Lines 41 to 48The stone in the stream

   The poem moves into a symbolic landscape. Hearts devoted to "one purpose alone" become like a stone set "To trouble the living stream". Around it everything moves and changes: the horse, the rider, the birds ranging "From cloud to tumbling cloud", all changing "Minute by minute".

7. Lines 49 to 56Minute by minute

   The details multiply: a cloud's shadow on the stream, a horse-hoof sliding on the brim, moor-hens diving and calling to their mates. Everything living changes and renews itself, while "The stone's in the midst of all". The image honours the rebels' fixed purpose, but a stone does not live.

8. Lines 57 to 64Too long a sacrifice

   Yeats states the danger plainly: "Too long a sacrifice" can "make a stone of the heart". When it will be enough is "heaven's part". The poet's part is "To murmur name upon name", like a mother soothing a child who has at last fallen asleep, a tender image that avoids the word "death".

9. Lines 65 to 73Needless death

   Then he refuses the comfort: "No, no, not night but death". He asks whether the deaths were needless, since "England may keep faith" and grant Home Rule after all, and whether "excess of love" bewildered them. He leaves these questions open; it is enough "To know they dreamed and are dead".

10. Lines 74 to 80Changed utterly

    "I write it out in a verse": Yeats sets down the four names like an inscription. Now and in time to come, "Wherever green is worn", they are "changed, changed utterly". The green of Irish nationalism replaces the "motley" of line 14, and the refrain sounds a final, public verdict.

Themes

Context

The Easter Rising began in Dublin on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, with the General Post Office as its headquarters. Yeats was in England at the time. After the surrender the leaders were court-martialled and shot in May, most of them at Kilmainham Gaol, among them John MacBride, Maud Gonne's estranged husband, on 5 May. The executions turned Irish opinion towards the rebels.

Yeats wrote the poem between May and September 1916; the text is dated "September 25th, 1916". Clement Shorter printed 25 copies privately that year, but the poem's first public printing came only on 23 October 1920, in the New Statesman (The Dial followed in November), during the War of Independence. It was collected in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala Press, 1921).

Yeats knew several of the people in the poem. He had met Constance Markievicz and her sister Eva Gore-Booth at Lissadell in the 1890s; Markievicz was sentenced to death after the Rising but reprieved. The poem also answers his own "September 1913": the Dublin he had dismissed as shopkeeping and dull had produced the self-sacrifice he said was "dead and gone".

Form

Four stanzas of 16, 24, 16 and 24 lines, mostly short three-beat lines rhyming alternately, with many half rhymes ("faces" and "houses", "gibe" and "club"). Readers have noticed that the numbers echo the date of the Rising, 24 April 1916. The loose, speaking rhythm lets doubt into the poem, while the refrain gives each stanza a firm, ceremonial close.

Studying this poem

What to focus on

• How the refrain develops from the shock of the first stanza to the public verdict of the last, and the paradox of "A terrible beauty".
• Yeats's mixed feelings: admiration for the rebels' courage alongside doubts about fanaticism and needless death.
• The portraits in stanza 2, and how Yeats balances private feeling (especially about MacBride) with public tribute.
• The symbolism of the stone and the living stream in stanza 3, and how stanza 4 reinterprets it.
• The poet's role as a recorder of history: naming the dead and writing "it out in a verse".

Key quotations

• Polite meaningless words,

  Repeated in lines 6 and 8, the phrase exposes how shallow Yeats's contact with the rebels was, and how little he took them seriously before the Rising.

• All changed, changed utterly:

  The repeated "changed" and the absolute "utterly" stress a complete and irreversible transformation: of the rebels, of Ireland, and of Yeats's own view of them.

• A terrible beauty is born.

  An oxymoron at the heart of the poem: the Rising is terrible in its violence and death, yet beautiful in its courage. "Born" suggests the birth of a new Ireland.

• A drunken, vain-glorious lout.

  Yeats's harsh private judgement of MacBride stays in the poem. Including him anyway shows the Rising's power to transform even those Yeats disliked.

• Can make a stone of the heart.

  The stone image becomes a warning: long, single-minded devotion to a cause may harden people, making them heroic but less fully human.

• And what if excess of love

  Yeats offers a generous possible explanation: the rebels may have been bewildered by too much love for Ireland, rather than driven by hatred.

All the Leaving Cert poems