William Butler Yeats, “Easter, 1916”
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,
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 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
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Here is how this letter originated. My friend Bernie Sanders told me, with justifiable pride, that he had just returned from a successful trip to Europe to sell his most recent book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. He spoke to audiences of 1600 in Liverpool, Manchester, London, Dublin. Everywhere, he had large, enthusiastic audiences, although in Ireland some protested his nuanced stance on Israel and the West Bank.
Bernie talked to me about his visit to the Irish museum in the Dublin Post Office, which was the site of a major rebellion against the British. I told him I knew about the post office and the Easter Rising, as it was called, because William Butler Yeats had written about those days in poems that grew out of his complex feelings about the Irish struggle for independence from Britain.
The most remarkable and memorable of these poems is the poem you have just read, the poem that begins this letter. It is to my mind among the greatest elegies of all time: “Easter 1916.” What particularly marks this poem, in two lines which we shall encounter, is his inscription of four names, those of Thomas MacDonagh, John MacBride, James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, who were among the fourteen people executed by firing squad for their participation in the Easter Rising.
Elegies tend toward the poetic: metaphor amplifies the reality of death. (Maybe metaphor also softens the edges of finality, as well?) But metaphor is not, finally, for Yeats. The particular, his invocation of names, proves more concrete than the metaphorical:
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
The sudden and inescapable appearance of the names of the dead is stunning; the couplet gives a reality to this poem that almost no other elegy has ever achieved.
Before we embark on reading the poem, however, a short history lesson is in order. Throughout the nineteenth century, and especially in its later half, Irish revolutionaries demanded, and struggled for, independence from Britain. One island, Ireland, is next to another, Britain: why should the British isle hold sovereignty over Ireland? In the twentieth century Britain passed two Home Rule bills, in 1886 and 1893, to confer limited self-government for Ireland; nonetheless, Britain maintained its rule over Ireland.
Thus, at the turn of the twentieth century, Ireland was under British rule, as it had been for centuries. This is the backdrop for the thousand Irish men and women who rose up to demand an Irish Republic on Easter, April 24, 1916.
There was not, we need to understand as we look back, unanimity among those who wanted independence. When World War One broke out, the Irish revolutionaries were split. Some wanted to subsume the drive for independence from Britain under the larger aegis of winning the war; others felt that the need for independence was greater than the need to protect Britain and its colonial lands, and that the struggle for independence should continue, even if that struggle inhibited the war effort.
Among the latter group was a small cluster of revolutionaries who felt that an open rebellion against the British forces occupying Ireland would surely spark a large uprising of Irish citizens supporting the need for independence. To that end, the revolutionaries planned for a general uprising of the Irish, who it was believed would join them in resistance to Britain. Of the thousand who rose up, a cadre (their leadership) of those who demanded independence took over the General Post Office in Dublin on April, 24, 1916.
These leaders were captured and, despite their hopes, no grand rebellion occurred. Thereafter they were tried for treason, and most were shot by firing squads. In the short run, the attempt at rebellion was a failure: No mass uprising followed the Rising, and Britain proceeded to prosecute its war with Germany. As we know, Britain and its allies won the First World War against the Kaiser and his allies. In the long run, however, the Irish – at least the south of Ireland – achieved independence from Britain. The killings of the Easter Rising leaders hardened the desire of the (southern, Catholic) Irish to be free of British rule. Was the Post Office ‘affair,’ then, a failure or a success? That question is unresolved to this day. It forms the substance of Yeats’s poem.
Let me be clear at the outset about Yeats’s deep underlying ambivalence, for we are truly unused to a poet being self-confidently certain and yet doubting his own certainty. This poem is built on the uncanny tensions between the poet’s sureness that he knows what is right and his (grudging) acknowledgement his cavalier attitudes may yet be wrong. Yeats knows the revolutionaries he encounters are foolish and besotted with a false belief that revolution is just around the corner. He knows these revolutionaries are wrong, stupid, unaware of the mutability of the ever-changing world. (He is right in both of these judgments.) Yet the poem recognizes that the poet’s views, however rational and well-based, might also be wrong. He says things and, sotto voce and with trepidation, takes them away. This tension, between belief and the growing sense that seen through the larger lens of history his belief may be in error, drives the poem and makes it endlessly fascinating.
The poem has four stanzas, and we shall examine each in turn. The first, third and fourth stanzas are in quatrains, the rhyme ABAB for each quatrain. Some of the rhymes are full, some slant. The second stanza seems irregular, but isn’t; what complicates the scansion is that several of the rhymes continue in this second stanza into succeeding quatrains as slant rhymes (will/shrill//beautiful/school in stanzas one and two; friend/end//seemed/dream in quatrains three and four). Despite the intrusions of slant rhyme into a further stanza, the second stanza’s rhyme scheme is ABAB throughout.
There are uneven number of syllables in the lines, but an equal number of stresses; which indicates this is strong stress meter, not accentual-syllabic like so much of much of English verse, where the reader counts both syllables and accents. (For accentual-syllabic, think iambic pentameter, which is the Shakespearian line.) In this poem, with its strong stress meter, each line has three stresses, three syllables with marked emphasis. The tight verse form and the loose syllabic count make for both the poem’s sense of control and its ease.
That ease is there at the start, as Yeats begins with his walk toward his club at “close of day.” Ease, as in a walk; and yet control, as in his recognition as he walks that he must come to terms with things that he perhaps does not want to come to terms with. It is a lovely first stanza, with one line repeated in an extended internal rhyme:
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.
We learn from those first four lines that he, the poet, is ambling along at the work-day’s end when he encounters familiar people with “vivid” faces. They are flushed with an excess of feelings – “vivid” here refers not so much to their being alive, as to their being charged with a superfluity of (revolutionary) emotion as they leave the offices where they labored in “grey” houses at desks or counters. Bureaucrats? Clerks? As one does when one meets an acquaintance, there pass between the people he meets and himself nods of recognition or “polite meaningless words.” Ah, that phrase, which contains so much of what goes for normal human verbal intercourse, the formulae by which we meet one another and go on our way, nothing of import having been said other than ‘I know you and have recognized that we know each other.’ To emphasize the meaninglessness of the words, Yeats repeats the line.
The poem’s narrator reveals his superiority to the people he meets, an attitude which will continue through the poem’s first three stanzas. These people are slowly revealed as the revolutionaries who are plotting the Post Office insurrection. ‘I’ll tell a funny story about them when I get to my club’ – he reveals his ‘class status’ when he drops in that ‘club’ with its private membership – ‘because I am sure that they are fools, jesters who wear “motley.”’ The motley, of course, is what jesters wear, the disparate colors indicating their incongruity, revealing them as ludicrous. Despite the easygoingness of the lines, which can lull the reader into thinking the episode is random and nonchalant, these lines are essential to the poem. The narrator indicates he thinks of the revolutionaries as fools who can provide the content for droll stories he will tell to his rather entitled colleagues at the club, but his belief is radically undermined by the last two lines of the stanza, which will become the poem’s refrain. They are repeated twice more, including the final momentous conclusion to the poem. “All is changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born.”
These vivid-faced people are the butt of jokes, yes. But the narrator recognizes that they are also completely, “utterly” changed. The revolutionaries become beautiful, though not in any conventional sense. The beauty they usher forth is a “terrible beauty.” Terror. The beauty is filled with fear, with danger, with peril. It is the beauty of the sublime, not the beauty of an incandescent, transcendent loveliness. (One thinks, perhaps, of the famous last lines of Yeat’s “The Second Coming,” “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” But transcendent beauty? Early on, Yeats referred to such beauty in his “The Lake Isle of Innisfree:” “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow/ Dropping from the veils of morning to where the cricket sings;/ There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow. / And evening full of the linnet’s wings.”) Here, in this poem, a beauty is being born, but it is a “terrible” beauty.
There is an overall structure to the poem, shifting from the particular to the general and back again, from the actuality to the metaphorical and abstract and then back to the specific,. The first stanza recounts a walk, the speaker encountering people (unnamed, unidentified, grouped but not distinct from one another). The second stanza speaks to the particularity of these revolutionaries, real personages whom Yeats knows, both because Dublin at that time was a small town, and because as someone attracted to the idea of the liberation of Ireland, he encountered others who were engaged in making that idea a reality. The third stanza is abstract, metaphorical: It speaks of the stubborn resistance of a stone and a world which is in constant change. The fourth stanza, wondrously, continues the metaphor of the third, that rock, only to shift from the metaphorical to a specific historical perspective and to a naming of particulars. It ends with a subsidence into the larger, general, import of what he has experienced.
In that very particular second stanza Yeats begins with Con Markiewicz, who took part in the Easter Rising. I have written of her, and Yeats, earlier (type ‘Gutman Markiewicz’ in Google). In both this poem and in “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz” Yeats is dismissive of Con Markiewicz for, as he says here, being both “ignorant” and also “shrill” in her argumentation. Formerly a lovely horseback rider, she has become (in Yeats’s view) a harridan of revolution. As the only woman participating in the Easter Rising, she did not receive a death sentence in the trial that followed the attack on the Post Office. Yet even as Yeats decidedly puts her down, we recall his doubts of a few moments earlier, his doubts about “being certain:” “All is changed, changed utterly.” She seems a clown, aged into shrillness. Yet, we ask ourselves sotto voce (along with the narrator), might not all have changed and a new and terrible beauty have come into being?
Next comes Patrick Pearse, her “friend,” a teacher (“kept a school”) who “rode a wingèd horse,” Yeats’s way of saying he was a fellow poet, the winged horse Pegasus an emblem of inspiration. Yeats praises him, although that praise is tempered by the knowledge that, preferring action to lyric inspiration, he turned from his pen to the armed insurrection at the Post Office. Like his “helper and friend” (either Thomas MacDonagh, a fellow poet whose work was just beginning, or Patrick’s brother Willie Pearse) his thought may have been “daring and sweet,” but he too “lived where motley is worn:” Fools, jesters, persons seemingly ancillary to what is actually going on.
Finally, in bad faith, Yeats tells us of “a man I had dreamed/A drunken, vainglorious lout.” He is speaking of John MacBride. In Yeats’s eye, MacBride’s largest sin was his marriage to Maud Gonne, a woman Yeats adored and fell in love with. (MacBride had fought the British before: He was the commander of an Irish brigade who battled the British in the Boer war in South Africa. Yeats conveniently ignores MacBride’s history to focus on his own grievance.) “He had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart.” In other words, he had married Maud Gonne. Whew. This is jealousy speaking, taking the poet’s bitterness and turning it around to vilify his rival in love. “A drunken, vainglorious lout,” Yeat proclaims. MacBride did in fact have a problem with drink and he was marked by a self-regard. But he was also a serious man, an implacable opponent of British colonialism. Yet for Yeats his marriage to Maud Gonne was, well, unforgiveable. And so the poet maligns John MacBride in this stanza.
We move into the third stanza, which as mentioned before, shifts away from history and specificity into metaphor. The metaphor that dominates this section of the poem is the stone, which is unchangeable, even though it lies in a “living stream” which is constantly in change. Here, everything changes, except “hearts with one purpose alone,” hearts fixed and fixated on revolution, hearts that have turned to stone (been enchanted to a stone”) . This third stanza is a Heraclitean world where everything changes: Horses cantering along a road, their riders, even the birds around them and the clouds above them. Even, Yeats says, the shadows cast by the moving clouds as those shadows pass over the moving stream. All is in motion, everchanging, except for the stone which (“enchanted”) remains immutable. “Enchanted” suggests a magical trance, out of touch with the ‘real’ world., manipulated by an ‘enchanter.’
Yeats expands the metaphor of the stone in a stream by imagining ever more full detail. The poet envisions the horse crossing the stream, its hoof sliding into the water, the horse splashing through the stream. Even the birds move: Moorhens are water birds, and they dive within the flowing stream and mate – “hens to moor-cocks call” – alive to the everchanging world about them, the world which they inhabit and in which they are in the process of procreating. “Minute by minute they live,” says the poet; only “the stone’s in the midst of all.” Unchangeable, as the fixed objective of the revolutionary is. A revolutionary heart is inflexible, unmoving, unresponsive to change.
I myself have lived in such milieux. Revolutionaries are indeed unresponsive to anything but their need to foment revolution. Yeats has it right.
And this third stanza slips right into the fourth. “Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart.” So, the “stone…trouble[s] the living stream.” “Enchanted” by the dream of revolution, human beings adopt a fixed purpose. But Yeats wants responsiveness to a changing world, not sacrifice but flexibility to others and to an everchanging reality. (He does not want that irksome “trouble.”) “O when may it suffice,” he asks, or rather pleads. The answer is: Only God knows – “that is Heaven’s part.” Revolutionary fervor is out of joint with an everchanging world. It is like child’s play (more superiority from the adult poet). Yeats continues, saying that all we humans can do is murmur names, as a mother does to or over her child when the day has done and sleep comes to relax the feverish muscles that had run wild in childish play. Note that maternal naming of the child who is done with his childish games, which is in stark contrast to the recital of names which will recur several lines later, in an entirely other fashion.
What happens to the revolutionaries of the Easter Rising is like sleep for a child after a long day, only it is not sleep but death, and the night is not temporary but eternal. MacBride and Pearse are executed. Yeats proclaims, “we know their dream,” an Ireland free of British domination, an independent country and not a colony to be ruled from abroad. What a fierce line: “We know their dream; enough/ To know they dreamed and are dead.” The poet claims that the dream, of course, is not sufficient. Death, not liberation, is the culmination of this fixed desire in a world of constant change.
He is patronizing even about their deaths, calling the revolutionaries “bewildered.” (We recall that “enchanted.”) Yet Yeats acknowledges, in a significant proviso, that it was perhaps “excess of love” that bewildered them. Just as the mother, earlier, murmured the names of her children after their wild day of play, so he – in the face of his own bewildered love and the deaths that ensued for the rebels – murmurs the names of those who died. “I write it out in a verse,” he says, and then – in one of the greatest couplets in all of English verse – Yeats names the dead as his homage to those who, however bewildered, fought for the liberation of Ireland. Naming, here, is sufficient. The couplet consists of four names. (One thinks of the simple eloquence of the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, D. C., where the names of the war dead are inscribed on a low marble wall.)
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
This act of naming, quite literally putting their names in his verse, has enormous resonance. For to name is to make concrete, to make these personages specific human beings and not merely metaphors. In the end, after our lives are concluded, what we have is our names – it is what we put on tombstones, after all – and not much else. So Yeats names them: MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly, Pearse.
The poem recognizes, grudgingly, that these men will live forever in the memory of the Irish. Their rebellion failed, but their struggle will continue, and they will be its touchstones and heroes. A poem which began with men in “motley,” the fit subject for “gibes,” men who had “one purpose alone” and were like stones that troubled “the living stream,” has recognized that these men have been changed by what they have done. Their rebellion has elevated them, made them heroic. All, as the poet says, is changed, changed utterly.
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.
What drives this poem is the poet’s recognition of how wrong he has been. These men (and woman) have been fools, inflexible, bewildered. And yet, and yet, they have played their part in the great drama of history, a drama changed by their actions into something lasting and beautiful. What began in derision, what continued in an indictment of single-mindedness, ends with the recognition that the world is more complex – terrible yet beautiful – than we at first imagined it to be.
William Butler Yeats does, in this poem, what poets (and we ourselves) so rarely do: Even as he argues one thing, he recognizes that its opposite is true. The poem recognizes the growth of the poet’s imagination, in despite of its claims that the world is exactly as he observes it, that he knows all along what is true and what is not. Revolutionaries are patronized, made fun of, dismissed. And yet, Yeats realizes, perhaps those revolutionaries whom he made into “a mocking tale or a gibe/ To please a companion/ Around the fire at the club” are something other. Beautiful, meaningful, in their own way, which is the way of history.