EASTER, 1916

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS:

• William Butler Yeats was a famous Irish poet, dramatist and one of the pioneers of the
literary world in 20th century.
• He was also a member of the Irish Senate and served it for two terms. His contribution to
the English literature is as high as that to his native the Irish literature, where he is
remembered for his role in reviving the literature.
• In 1923, Yeats was awarded the honorary Nobel Prize in literature making him the first
Irishman to be honored with the award.  An Irish National Poet
• Poet Laureate ( Nobel Prize in 1923)
• Modernist Poet
• The leader of Irish Literary Movement
• A good friend of Rabindranath Tagore

INTRODUCTION:
In the Easter of 1916, the Irish made an uprising against the British. The British promised them
freedom, but when World War I broke out, they postponed this freedom to when it ended. The
Irish upheaved against this. And it is in reference to this upheaval that this poem was written. It
was published in the year 1921, when the memories of this revolution was still fresh in the minds
of the people.

SUMMARY:
The speaker of the poem starts by speaking of routine and mundane life. He is detached from his
fellow acquaintances and only speaks to them because he has to. He thought about how he could
please his companions at the club and that was all. But this silly and meaningless life was about
to change soon.
The speaker then dives right into the upheaval by speaking of the main people who took part in
it. He speaks of a beautiful woman grown hoarse by the politics, of a school founder, of a
budding poet and dramatist who lost his life before he could gain fame in the literary side, and of
a ‘lout’ who changed in the revolutionary for better.
They all lost their lives for one purpose only; freedom of the Irish. They strongly believed in it
and their convictions couldn’t be changed or moved. While everything was changing in this
world, their determination remained constant and so their legacies will be remembered for long,
long time.
The speaker then wonders if the revolution was really necessary; if so many sacrifices, so many
deaths could only be prevented if only they had waited a little longer, for the English might have
kept their word in granting their freedom. He does not know this but what he knows is that they
all have dreamt of a dream and they died while trying to achieve it. And for this they will be
remembered by the people and hence, a ‘terrible beauty’, a history of bloody upheaval full of
dreams was born.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT:
“Easter, 1916,” is a commemoration of the Easter Rising, which occurred when Irish nationalists
led a rebellion against British rule to try to win independence for Ireland. When W.B. Yeats was
born in 1865, Ireland was a colony of the British Empire. In 1800, Ireland had been joined with
Great Britain to form the United Kingdom. The Irish Parliament (the legislative branch of
government, similar to the United States Congress) was abolished; the Irish were represented
instead by the British Parliament.
Many Irish nationalists opposed the union with Great Britain and worked for decades to restore
Home Rule (self-government for Ireland). In 1914, a Home Rule Bill was passed in the British
Parliament. Its implementation was postponed, however, until the end of World War I, which
had just broken out. Irish nationalists decided to lead a rebellion against British rule before the
war was over, and leaders established a Military Council to plan the rising. Patrick Pearse was
director of Military Organization; James Connolly and Thomas Macdonough were members of
the Military Council; John MacBride later helped lead the rebel troops.
The Rising was planned for Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. Armed rebels seized key sites in
Dublin, the country’s capital city, including the General Post Office. Pearse, whom the rebels
elected president of the new Irish Republic, declared Ireland an independent state. The British
declared martial law and worked to suppress the rebellion by force. In the gunfire between Irish
and British troops, hundreds were killed and thousands were wounded. On April 29, as the Irish
were surrounded and outnumbered, Pearse ordered all troops to surrender.
The British then arrested thousands of Irish citizens. Many were released, but fourteen of the
leaders were ultimately sentenced to death and executed, including Pearse, Macdonough,
MacBride, and Connolly. Before the Rising and immediately afterwards, many Irish citizens had
been apathetic or hostile towards the rebels. But after the executions, the Irish public became
more sympathetic towards the rebels’ cause and more hostile towards the British. The Easter
Rising, then, though unsuccessful in the moment, did ultimately help promote the cause of Irish
independence.
After the Rising, the pro-independence party Sinn Fein won a large majority of Irish
parliamentary seats. In 1919, Sinn Féin formed its own government and declared independence
for Ireland. For two years following, the Irish Republican Army fought British forces in the Irish
War of Independence. In 1921, Ireland was divided and the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed.
Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom, but in the south, the Irish Free State was
created as a semi-independent dominion within the British Empire. In 1949, on the 33rd
anniversary of the Easter Rising, the Irish Free State became the fully independent Republic of
Ireland.
Yeats’s poem became part of the way Ireland remembered the Rising. On the 50th anniversary of
the Rising, for instance, a Dublin newspaper distributed commemorative posters of the General
Post Office under the headline “A Terrible Beauty is born.”
SYMBOLS:
EASTER (ALLAGORY):
An allegory is a work of art, such as a story or painting, in which the characters,
images, and/or events act as symbols. The symbolism in an allegory can be
interpreted to have a deeper meaning. An author may use allegory to illustrate a
moral or spiritual truth, or political or historical situation.
The fact that the Easter Rising began on the Christian holiday that gives its name allows the
poem to allegorically refer to Christ’s resurrection. Just as Jesus rose from the dead, the
commemoration of the revolutionaries allows them to live on in memory eternally: “Now and in
time to be.” Similarly, the idea that they are “changed, changed utterly” also builds on the idea of
being transformed after death. Finally, the importance of Easter is built into the very structure of
the poem. The uprising began on 24 April 1916. Two of the stanzas have 16 lines. The other two
have 24. There are four stanzas in total, representing the fourth month of the year.

THE WINGED HORSE:

The speaker writes that the teacher "rode our winged horse." Here, the winged horse is an
allusion to Greek mythology, in which Pegasus symbolizes poetic achievement.

STREAM:
The stream is a symbol for the constant change of the natural world. It is a “living stream”
because it is constantly flowing. In contrast, the stone does not change, and so it “trouble[s]” the
stream and nature’s law of change.

STONE:
The stone represents the unmoving determination the rebels had for independence. Much of
Stanza 3 is spent creating a complex image of a stone in the river. First, the narrator compares
the rebels' hearts to stone, unyielding in their "one purpose alone / Through summer and winter."
Later in the stanza, he creates a complicated image of the stone in a rushing river. No matter
what happens around the stone, from a horse splashing through the water to birds diving and
calling around it, the stone remains unmoved.
Similarly, no matter how much drama unfolded around the rebels, both before and during the
uprising, they remained steadfastly resolute in their fight. No one could convince them to change
their minds, and many marched to their deaths with "ignorant good-will" knowing they would
lose. They were "enchanted," swept up in the moment, incapable of seeing the past or the future:
"minute by minute they live: / The stone's in the midst of all."

GREEN:
The color green symbolizes Irish culture. At the opening of the poem, the narrator describes
Ireland as "grey" suggesting depression and gloom. He also describes the country as "motley"—
"where motley is worn"—suggesting that under English rule, Ireland lacks a unique identity,
with English and Irish culture jumbled together in "motley" mix. At the end of the poem,
however, he conjures green, a color now synonymous with Ireland, when noting the immortality
of the rebels who will be remembered "wherever green is worn." The rebels succeeded in uniting
a heterogeneous Irish population in outrage over their executions, creating a "terrible beauty"—
terrible because the rebels had to die, but beautiful because the people united. Bright green
washes away gloomy grey and represents the beautiful future of an independent Ireland.

TERRIBLE BEAUTY:
"Terrible beauty" refers to the effects of the uprising in Ireland. The uprising destroyed the
streets of Dublin, claimed many lives, and resulted in the execution of 15 leaders, many of whom
were Yeats's personal friends. These effects were inarguably terrible. Yet as a result of the
executions, the Irish people banded together with a new fire to fight for independence. Their
unity caused a rebirth of Irish nationalism, which to Yeats, was beautiful.
Three times in the poem (lines 16, 40, and 80) the narrator refers to a "terrible beauty" as he
struggles to reconcile the great losses and the great gains that resulted from the uprising. The
phrase also suggests the conflicted emotions Yeats felt, and which he tries to process throughout
the poem—starting first as apathetic and distanced, then grieved, then proud. In the end, the
narrator recognizes that history remembers moments of bloodshed and loss, and makes heroes of
the martyred rebels

SLEEPING CHILD:
The speaker uses the image of the sleeping child to symbolize the rebels after they have died. He
declares that the public should commemorate them by murmuring their names:
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
This image has several connections to the deceased rebels. Sleep is a common metaphor for
death, used numerous times in the Christian Bible. The sleeping child represents the rebels in a
way that softens the horror of their deaths, suggesting that they are at peace and even that they
may wake.
Children also traditionally represent innocence. With this image, the speaker softens his previous
critique of the rebels, suggesting that they shouldn't be condemned as guilty of a crime—even if,
as the child misbehaved while awake, they had "run wild" in the violent, destructive tactics they
adopted. Children may cause destruction without knowing it or intending it, and so with this
symbol the speaker acknowledges that the rebels, too, did not intend for people to be harmed
when they began the Rising. They only wanted to fight for their country's independence. The
speaker makes a similar point in lines 72-73—even repeating the word "wild"—when he asks,
"And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?" Their extreme love for their
country and their cause may have led them to extreme action without fully understanding or
intending all the consequences.
Additionally, the mother who tends the child may be a symbol of Ireland. One's home country is
often called "the motherland," and the citizens may be thought of as that country's children.
Ireland, then, would be the mother of the rebels. (Yeats himself uses the image of Ireland as a
mother in his poem "Remorse for Intemperate Speech," and the Proclamation of the Republic,
which was read out during the Rising, refers to the citizens as Ireland's children.) As citizens
who make up the country, the remaining community now has the mother's job of "nam[ing] her
child"—that is, remembering the rebels' names and honoring them for their deaths. The symbol
of the sleeping child adds a new dimension to the poem's characterization of the rebels and also
helps the speaker in his quest to find an appropriate response to their fate.

LITERARY ELEMENTS:
SPEAKER AND POINT OF VIEW:
The speaker is unnamed but is closely associated with the poet William Butler Yeats himself.
This is shown by the reference to John MacBride as someone who “had done most bitter
wrong/To some who are near my heart.” The speaker has lived in Dublin and met the
revolutionaries that the poem commemorates. He has ambivalent feelings about the Easter
Rising, seeing it both giving rise to “beauty” and as something “terrible.”

FORM AND METER:

The poem uses an ABAB rhyme scheme. The meter is described as an iambic trimeter or
threestress line, though it is not consistent. The number of syllables in each line varies between
six and nine.

METAPHORS:
A metaphor is a rhetorical figure of speech that compares two subjects without the
use of “like” or “as.”
• “Our winged horse” both refers to the mythical horse Pegasus and is a metaphor for the
art of poetry.  Everyday life is compared to a “casual comedy” in the poem through a
metaphor.  In the lines “Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart,” the heart is
a metaphor for human feelings and the stone is a metaphor for the numbing of these
feelings through excessive sacrifice.
• “What is it but nightfall?/No, no, not night but death.” In these lines, death is compared
to nightfall and sleep, but then the speaker corrects himself and says that death is just
death.
It cannot be described with a metaphor.
ALLITERATION AND ASSONANCE:
Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sounds at the beginning of
words that are in close proximity to each other.
Assonance is a literary device in which the repetition of similar vowel sounds takes
place in two or more words in proximity to each other within a line of poetry or
prose.
• A terrible beauty is born (alliteration and assonance of “b” sounds)
• So sensitive his nature seemed (alliteration of “s” sounds)
• No, no, not night but death (alliteration of “n” sounds)
• To know they dreamed and are dead (alliteration of “d” sounds)
• Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty (alliteration and assonance of “t” sounds
• Coming with vivid faces (assonance of “I” sounds)
• A shadow of cloud on the stream (assonance of “o” and “a” sounds)
• The long-legged moor-hens dive (assonance of “o” sounds)

IRONY:
The definition of irony as a literary device is a situation in which there is a
contrast between expectation and reality.
The speaker’s relationship to the executed rebels contains situational irony. He describes meeting
them in passing with “polite meaningless words.” He also admits to having mocked them while
sitting around a fire at a club in order to make friends laugh. Yet the unexpected result of the
Easter Rising is that they become transformed by the events into something larger. The poem
ends by naming Macdonough, MacBride, Connolly, and Pearse directly and saying that they will
be remembered “Now and in time to be.” In this way, the poem moves from every day, trivial
encounters to matters of deep historical importance.

GENRE:
Romanticism, political poetry, modernism

SETTING:
Dublin, Ireland before and after the Easter Rising of 1916 (April 24th-April 29th). The action
takes places on the “grey” streets of the city and in a club. The third stanza describes an
identified natural scene where horses, clouds, streams, and chickens exist.

TONE:
Ambivalent, uncertain, mournful, elegiac
MAJOR CONFLICT:
The major conflict of the poem is the Easter Rising itself and the speaker's ambivalent feelings
about the events. At the end of the fight between the Irish Republicans and the British Army, the
rebels are executed. The poem asks whether their sacrifice was worth it and whether or not being
committed to a cause makes one lose one’s better judgment and reason. The speaker argues that
the result of this event is ambiguous. It gives rise to a “terrible beauty.”

FORESHADOWING:
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which the author gives clues about events
that will happen later in the story.
The first stanza ends with the line “A terrible beauty is born,” which is repeated throughout the
poem. This line foreshadows the events of the Easter Rising and the execution of its leaders.

ALLUSIONS:
An allusion is a reference, typically brief, to a person, place, thing, event, or other
literary work with which the reader is presumably familiar.
The line "That is heaven's part" suggests that it is up to God to decide when enough sacrifice has
been made that the Irish Republican cause will be successful. It is an allusion to Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, in which the Ghost refers to Gertrude and says “leave her to heaven.”
The lines “For England may keep faith/For all that is done and said” allude to the Government of
Ireland Act 1914, which declared that Ireland would be given Home Rule (self-government
within the United Kingdom). With the outbreak of World War I, the British government deferred
Irish Home Rule until the war was over.

METONYMY AND SYNECDOCHE:

Metonymy is a type of figurative language in which an object or concept is
referred to not by its own name, but instead by the name of something closely
associated with it.
Synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to signify the
whole, or vice-versa.
"England" is used as a metonym for the English government.
“Coming with vivid faces/From counter or desk” uses synecdoche to refer to workplaces like
shops (with their counters) and offices or schools (with their desks).

HYBERBOLE:
Hyperbole is the use of obvious and deliberate exaggeration. Hyperbolic
statements are often extravagant and not meant to be taken literally.
“All changed, changed utterly” is an example of hyperbole, as not everything can be changed by
a single event.

ONOMATOPOEIA:
Onomatopoeia refers to a word that phonetically mimics or resembles the sound of
the thing it describes.
“And a horse plashes within it” uses onomatopoeia in the word “plash” (meaning “splash”) to
imitate the sound of a horse stepping in water

RHETORIC:
• She rode to harriers? (Line 23) Using “? “In this line show that the poet has a question in
his mind about the line before and express it by put this line. \

• When may it suffice? (Line 59) In this line the poet, the writer take the meaning of the
line above is that the poet see that there is still found a darkness and not yet feel the
freedom. There the poet also emphasized it by using? Without the answer.

• Was it needless death after all? (Line 67) The poet again emphasized by the punctuation;
as though need some answer, but the poet means jus to emphasize the line before

• Bewildered them till they died? (Line 73) it means that the heroes sacrificing the soul to
their country and the poet emphasized it by the punctuation?

OXZYMORON:
An oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two seemingly opposing and
contradictory elements are juxtaposed.

“A terrible beauty is born”. Terrible contrast of beauty.

“ignorant goodwill”.

IMAGERY:
As a literary device, imagery consists of descriptive language that can function as
a way for the reader to better imagine the world of the piece of literature
There is much imagery in the paragraph 3 of the poem. Horses, riders, clouds, moor-hens with
long legs; grey eighteenth century houses they are all part of the imagery used.
REFRAIN:
Refrain is a verse, a line, a set, or a group of lines that appears at the end of
stanza, or appears where a poem divides into different sections.
“A terrible beauty is born”. Repeated after every stanza.

THEMES;
1. AMBIVALENCE:
One central theme of the poem is ambivalence. This means having mixed or contradictory
feelings. The speaker shows throughout the poem that one can commemorate the fighters of the
Easter Rising without having to decide for certain whether or not what they did was good or
right. This ambivalent attitude is clear from the repeated line “A terrible beauty is born.” That the
Easter Rising can be both terrible and beautiful shows that certain historical events go beyond
our moral judgments. We do not have to completely support them to be moved by them and
recognize them as turning points.

2. CHANGE:
In the third stanza, the speaker argues that change is the essence of nature. The line “minute by
minute they change” refers to horses, birds, chickens, and clouds. Nature is also cyclical,
changing through “summer and winter.” The stone is described as something that exists outside
of this law of change. It is a symbol of the steadfast heart of the revolutionary. It does not change
because it has “one purpose alone.” The stone sits still in the middle of a stream: while the
stream is constantly changing and moving, the stone is immovable. For this reason, the stone
“trouble[s] the living stream," the same way the revolutionary’s unchanging heart seems to
trouble the very laws of nature.

3. HISTORICAL DESTINY:
The poem suggests that while people may try to intervene in history, the results go far beyond
whatever they intended. For example, one of the revolutionaries “has resigned his part/In the
casual comedy.” This means that trying to change history also involves giving up control and
playing whatever role destiny determines. While this revolutionary tried to change the world,
“He, too, has been changed in his turn.”

4. SACRIFICE:
“Too long a sacrifice,” the speaker notes, “Can make a stone of the heart.” By renouncing their
lives in the name of a cause, the revolutionaries have become hardened. This means that they are
even willing to risk death for the sake of an independent Ireland. This type of sacrifice is a form
of craziness for the speaker: “And what if excess of love/Bewildered them till they died?” Their
sacrifice comes from a love for their people and country, but the results are deadly and
irreversible.
 5. MARTYRDOM:

While the poem is ambivalent about the revolutionaries’ actions, it suggests that they have been
somehow transformed or ennobled in death. For example, one of them was a “drunken,
vainglorious lout” but his execution has made him “changed in his turn,/Transformed utterly.”
Death has transformed these men beyond whatever they were in life. They stand for something
larger than themselves and for that they will be remembered “Now and in time to be,/Wherever
green is worn” (green being the symbolic color of Ireland)

6. IMMORTALITY:
Yeats's poem questions the great loss of lives during the Easter Rebellion of 1916, particularly
questioning whether the rebels had to die. The narrator asks, "O when may it suffice?” seeming
to question why the rebels would sacrifice themselves for a cause they knew they were doomed
to lose. What gives the sacrifice value is the recognition that Thomas Macdonough, John
MacBride, James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, and the other rebels who lost their lives earned
immortality in return. Through each stanza of the poem, the rebels are "changed" from everyday
citizens, whom the narrator initially rebuffs, to immortalized martyrs.
While the rebels started out as ordinary people (a noble woman, a teacher, a poet, an angry
drunk), the narrator asserts their names will be remembered in Irish history books as heroes.
Their martyrdom brought Ireland together, unified in horror against England's violence. Yeats
partakes in the immortalization by listing some of the rebels' names in this poem, and the
narrator urges readers to "murmur name upon name" to keep their memories alive. In the end, the
narrator claims that while the rebels' deaths are eternal, so are their memories as they will be
thought of "now and in time to be, / wherever green is worn

7. RESURRECTION:
The fact that the uprising takes place on Easter, a Christian religious holiday that celebrates the
resurrection of Jesus Christ, immediately conjures images of rebirth. In the Bible, Jesus Christ
offers a blood sacrifice to atone for human sin by dying on the cross. He lies, as if asleep, in a
tomb for three days, rising from the dead on Easter Sunday. Many rebels were influenced by the
idea of a "blood sacrifice" to rejuvenate Irish nationalism, and there's no question their
executions inspired a new wave of patriotism.
Yet the narrator questions whether the sacrifice was needed, noting that the rebels were ordinary
men who, unlike Jesus Christ, were not themselves resurrected. They were met with "not night
but death." The narrator struggles with this ideological divide throughout the poem. Did so many
people need to die? Is the resurrection of an ideal as important as human life? History has
seemingly answered the narrator's question. While the rebels died, there was a resurrection
within the Irish nation, as its citizens were unified in outrage and demanded independence. Just
as Christianity was born out of Christ's martyrdom, a new Irish nationalism was born out of the
rebels' martyrdom
 8. ADMIRATION:

Admiration is kind of a funny theme in "Easter, 1916," in the sense that Yeats seems like he's
always on the verge of admiring the people who died in the Irish Uprising. But at the end of the
day, he can never seem to take that final step and say, "These people were heroes and I was a
coward for not dying with them!" But hey, many people have heard of Yeats, and the fighters
Yeats mentions in this poem are all fairly obscure. So in the end, history was pretty good to
Yeats. When he claims that everything has been "Transformed utterly" (39), Yeats means that
the dead fighters have succeeded in making Ireland a better place. Deep down, Yeats admires the
dead fighters because he thinks people will remember them longer than they will remember him

9. PRINCIPLES:
It might be hard to see at first, but Yeats does have some principles. He doesn't necessarily have
the same principles as the people who died in the Easter Uprising, but that doesn't mean he has
none of his own. Yeats seems to be more interested in long, long-term historical changes than he
is in individual battles, like those that took place during "Easter, 1916." You might not agree
with his stand-back-from-history-and-write-poetry-about-it approach to life. But at least the
dude's consistent about his beliefs.
Deep down, Yeats questions his own principles as a poet and fears that he might be a coward
compared to the people who died in the Easter Uprising. In this poem, it doesn't look like Yeats
has any principles at all. In fact, he can't even explain why he's writing this poem to begin with

ANAYLSIS:
“Easter, 1916” praises the uprising but it does this in a complex and often ambiguous manner. In
the repeated line “A terrible beauty is born,” for example, there is both praise and criticism. As
Irish historian Fearghal McGarry writes, when people read this line "they tend to focus more on
the 'beauty' than the 'terrible' and it becomes a kind of euphemism.” However, a “terrible beauty”
is not just a great beauty but one that causes terror. For the speaker of Yeats’s poem, the Easter
Rising is a complex event—neither completely good nor completely bad. As the poem explores
the event and some of its primary actors, it does not resolve this ambiguity on one side or the
other. Instead, it shows that the meaning of the event cannot be solved for certain. The only sure
thing is that the world has been changed permanently and a new period has begun. For this
reason, it is worth remembering the names of the people who fought in this conflict and who died
for the dream of an independent Ireland.

STANZA 1:
The first stanza begins with a description of Dublin before the Easter Rising. The speaker says “I
have met them,” referring to some of the nationalist fighters. They have “vivid faces” but they
walk down “grey” streets and work in offices or shops. The speaker says, “I have passed [them]
with a nod of the head/Or polite meaningless words.” He is not close friends with these people,
but they stop and chat occasionally. However, behind their backs he often ridicules them. He
thinks about how he has told “a mocking tale or a gibe/To please a companion/Around the fire at
the club.” The attitude towards these people here is dismissive. He even compares the residents
of Dublin to court jesters, as they all “lived where motley is worn.” The last two lines of this
stanza then reveal a strong shift in tone: “All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is
born.” Neither the city nor its people can be the same again after the events of the Easter Rising.

STANZA 2:
Some of the principal participants of the Rising are described in the second stanza, though they
are not named until the end of the poem. The woman who was once “young and beautiful” but
who became “shrill” from arguing with others is Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz. She was a
suffragist and nationalist politician as well as a countess. The man who “kept a school” was
educator Patrick Pearse. He was an educator and poet. The speaker says that he “rode our winged
horse,” referring to poetry. His “helper,” who was “sensitive,” “daring,” and “sweet,” is Thomas
MacDonagh. Besides being a political activist, MacDonagh was a poet and playwright. The
fourth person here is John MacBride. He was a major in the Irish Republican Army and was
married to Maud Gonne, an Irish revolutionary, suffragette, and actress. William Butler Yeats
was close with Gonne and famously in love with her. He hated MacDonagh for having abused
Gonne while the two were married. That is the meaning of the line “He had done most bitter
wrong/To some who are near my heart.” Yet the speaker says that he includes him in the poem
anyway because “He, too, has resigned is part/In the casual comedy.” By participating in the
Easter Rising, he was transformed beyond his everyday self as a “drunken, vainglorious lout.”
He becomes a part of the “terrible beauty” of the events of 1916. Finally, there is the actor James
Connolly, who led the Irish Citizen Army Volunteers.

STANZA 3:
The third stanza is quite different from the others in the poem. The speaker no longer narrates
from the first-person perspective. Instead, there are descriptions of nature. The symbol of the
stone appears here. It is a metaphor for the heart of the revolutionary. These dedicated people are
singular in their purpose and refuse to change. In this, they are different than the rest of the
natural world. While nature is in constant movement and changes with the seasons, the stone
remains the same. The stone is contrasted with the “living stream.” While water constantly
flows, the stone stays in place. In this way it “trouble[s] the living stream,” as if causing
disturbance to nature’s regular way of doing things. While horses walk around or clouds fly
overhead, “the stone’s in the midst of all.” It does not live “minute to minute” like them but has
“one purpose alone.” Just as the Easter Rising has given birth to a “terrible beauty,” the stone
heart of revolutionaries is shown both to be a thing of wonder and something that eerily breaks
the laws of nature.

STANZA 4:
The fourth and final stanza begins with a clearer statement of the speaker’s doubt. He worries
that extreme sacrifice, like the revolutionaries showed, “can make a stone of the heart.” He asks
a series of questions. First, he wonders when all of this sacrifice will be enough. Then he
describes the death of the four revolutionaries and rhetorically asks if their death is not
something like sleeping. He then vigorously rejects that thought using strong repetitions: “No,
no, not night but death.” To call their death sleep would be to cheapen it. Death is something
permanent. Then the speaker asks, “Was it needless death after all?” He says that “England may
keep faith.” This refers to a promise given by the British government to give Ireland Home Rule.
This promise was lifted during World War I, which was raging when the events of the Easter
Rising were happening. Here the speaker says that after the war, Irish republicans may get what
they want without having to shed blood. It is here that the speaker stresses the ambiguity of the
Easter Rising. He suggests that the violence might have been unnecessary. The uprising also
failed and ended in bloodshed. However, the speaker does not condemn the revolutionaries but
says that their “excess of love” might have “bewildered” them.

END:
The climax of the poem comes in stanza four when the speaker names four of the revolutionaries
executed in 1916: “I write it out in a verse—/MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and
Pearse.” This is an attempt to immortalize these men. The speaker says that all that those who
survive can do is to “murmur name upon name,/As a mother names her child” when it is being
rocked to sleep. These men are now “changed, changed utterly.” Their death has caused that
“terrible beauty” to come into the world. This has transformed the character of the men. Some
were good and some were bad, but in their death they are much more than who they were just as
individuals. Similarly, the uprising itself may have been doomed or foolish, but it has
transformed the world. The poet does not idealize either the event or the participants. However,
he shows that it is still necessary to mourn the dead and recognize the significance of what has
happened, whether it is for the better or worse.