A group of Irish rebels seized the General Post Office in Dublin and held it for several days. After they surrendered, sixteen of them were executed, and others were imprisoned.
Yeats’ Interest in Politics
Although Yeats had served as a senator in the first Irish senate, his attitude toward politics in general is best summarized by the lines from his little poem, “Politics”: “How can I, that girl standing there, / My attention fix / On Roman or on Russian / Or on Spanish politics? . . . But O that I were young again / And held her in my arms!”
Yeats was more interested in the personal than the political. Instead of asserting a deeply held belief about any political stance, he would make vague drama out of political issues, even something as profound as the independence of his native land.
Polite Meaningless Words
In “Easter, 1916,” the speaker delivers six stanzas of these mild dramas that swirl around the Easter Rising event and the players who took part, some of whom Yeats had known personally. In the first stanza, the speaker begins by claiming he had seen his fellow countrymen coming home from work, and “I have passed with a nod of the head / Or polite meaningless words.”
His small talk with his fellows demonstrates an apathy that changed after the Easter event, because at the end of the first stanza the speaker introduces what becomes a refrain: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”
He notes that the mood of Ireland after the Rising is that people are stirred up and ready to fight for independence from England, but he also demonstrates that he is not as excited about the possibility as they are. While strong-willed patriots would find independence of their homeland a profoundly beautiful thing, this speaker portrays it as a “terrible beauty,” about which he remains ambivalent.
The people in the second stanza are presumed to be Constance Markievicz, the woman whose days “were spent / In ignorant good-will” and who argued politics so vehemently at night that her voice grew shrill, and yet the speaker remembers when her voice was sweet “When, young and beautiful, / She rode to harriers?” The others are Patrick Pearse, who established a school and his friend who helped at the school, Thomas MacDonagh.
More Interest in Art than Politics
But the speaker of this poem is more interested in their possibilities as writers and artists. About Pearse, he “rode our winged horse,” and allusion to Pegasus, the winged horse of poetry. About MacDonagh, he claims, “He might have won fame in the end, / So sensitive his nature seemed, / So daring and sweet his thought.”
In the third stanza, the speaker muses about the usefulness of all that passion that sparked the rebels to make such a bold move. But his emphasis is on the fact that the people as well as the whole atmosphere have changed, even the “drunken, vainglorious lout,” whom he disdained has changed. And once again, in stanza three, he repeats, “A terrible beauty is born.”
Stanzas four and five focus on a philosophical musing about how the heart becomes hard whether one is steadfastly dedicated to a cause or simply sacrificed too long. Then he asks the important question, “Was it needless death after all?” The speaker does not know how he feels about this countrymen turning into rebels who could storm a government building and resist authority.
Dramatic Musings
In the final stanza, he says that England, after all, “may keep faith,” and allow Ireland its independence, and if that happens, it prompts the question, did they die in vain? The speaker acknowledges that they died for their dreams, but all the speaker can finally attest to is that all “Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”
Ultimately, what Yeats has accomplished in the poem is a dramatic musing stating honestly that things are changed, and it may be for the better, but again, it may not be. The Irish people will have to wait until the “terrible beauty,” which was recently born, has done some maturing.
Other article on Yeats: W. B. Yeats' “Lapis Lazuli”
