Canadian Journal of Irish Studies – Yeats and the Easter Rising by Foster.

Yeats responded to the Easter Rising as a public poet but felt the need for a personal response as well. The Yeatsian
aesthetic, in “Easter 1916” and other Yeats poems inspired by the Rising, is the bridge between the personal and the
public. The poem’s ambiguities and reservations are characteristically Yeatsian. So too is the attempt to appropriate a
public event by absorbing it into a developing poetic philosophy. “Easter 1916” and other Rising poems by Yeats are
as much autobiographical as panegrycal. Social class, tragedy, image, mask, folk form: all are elements in Yeat’s poetic
philosophy, compelled into fusion by the Dublin rebellion.

Yeats was genuinely shocked by occurrences in Dublin, and it is difficult to doubt that “Easter 1916” is in one sense a
formidable attempt at appropriation. The poem registers the annoyed surprise and somewhat contrived responsibility
Yeats felt as a private individual and public figure before offering a canonical image of the Rising that establishes the
importance as much of Yeats to the Rising as of the Rising to Yeats.

In “Easter 1916”, the public demand that the executed architects of the Rising be paid homage is qualified by a personal
demand for a more urgently felt response. The personal response is voiced not only by the poet as Irish citizen and
literary man harbouring doubts about a headstrong display of physical force, but also by the poet as composer of an
intricate canon challenged by a violent public event to absorb it and still retain coherence. The Yeatsian aesthetic is
the bridge between the personal and the poetic, between reaction and rhetoric, and the tensions in that bridge that
the troubled gap between opposing shores creates are both revealing and rewarding to contemplate.

“Easter 1916” shares with most other contemporary poems about the Rising an acknowledgement of the rebels’ self-
sacrifice. Yeats seems to have felt more eloquently, if not more deeply, the guilt many mockers began to feel as the
executions followed their horrifying course. The notion of sacrifice pervades the finished poem, but this is perhaps
because the guild engendered by the executions that dragged on and made seeming mockery of premature anti-rebel
sentiment sought exorcism in praise of what the leaders had surrendered.

In any case, the initial personal doubts remain in the poem and both translate into the Yeatsian and the conventional.
In “Easter 1916” we are given both the admission of guilt and the transforming sacrifice, but it is through the very
utterness and unexpectedness of the change that Yeats allows himself a roomy middle ground in which to question
the wisdom of the sacrifice, both personal and political:

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.

The perplexities Yeats is wrestling with mount and multiply. The fanatical and idealistic hearts of the rebels may have
turned to stone, and this surely was an unwise thing to have let happen. A human heart turned to stone, deaf to human

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petition, is a very different matter from the stonelike effect of an historical occurrence and denies the very world it
seeks in its impassibility to improve and make more human.

If the rebels’ hearts have been enchanted into stones, presumably this occurred before the Rising that the
enchantment in fact made possible. The stonelike hearts of the rebels may even belong to our world after all, for they
“trouble the living stream”, not merely by causing anxiety in us but also by disturbing us into living movement. Living
or dead, it is the changed hearts of the rebels that in turn change us. And if the cold passion of the rebels has put them
insensitively beyond nature, it is Yeats himself who completes that process by his concluding epitaph that chisels their
names on the national gravestone.

Yeats permits us to associate the executions of the rebels with the crucifixion of Christ, while leaving it unclear if the
sacrifices would be ultimately benign or malignant, an ambivalence possibly towards Christ. Yeats is unsure of the
future, while being certain that rupture is inevitable and frightening, whatever order it ushers in.

Yeat’s problem was to contrive and occupy a no-man’s land between personal involvement and doubt and public
admiration while seeming not to do so. The process by which the solution is achieved is “Easter 1916”. Because Dublin
was a small and intimate city, the rebel leaders were familiar to Dubliners and were acquainted with Yeats and other
poets.

Yeats in “Easter 1916” affects to see an unsentimental poignancy, even cold marvel, in the manner in which mere
acquaintances suddenly assumed a new status, a martyrdom and imperishability, though it is Yeats who is in part
directing the assumption.

In the poem’s second part Yeats devotes no lines to Connolly, two impersonal lines to Pearse, five to MacDonagh,
seven to Constance Markievicz and nine to John MacBride, reversing the relative historical importance of the
participants while roughly reflecting Yeat’s degree of involvement with each. Personal acquaintance creates guilt
whereas the impersonal roll-call that concludes the poem defers to the public and unevadable fact of execution. He
begins with the anonymity of faces and disguising costume moves through the recollection of imprisoned or executed
acquaintances who are unnamed, merely “numbered”, yet readily identifiable by the reader, and reaches the
appropriate and identifying finality of rhythmic last names.

By choosing to allude rather than refer to the rebels he had met, and by pitching his allusions between the daily and
the legendary, the familiar and the reverent, Yeats leaves room to insert himself into the event. In the middle of the
poem it is Yeats not history who chooses magisterially which of his acquaintances will be numbered in the song. The
final outright naming of MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse is the reluctant but obligatory
conventionalism the poem shares with other poems about the Rising.

The motley and “casual comedy” of pre-Rising Dublin, as Yeats saw it, was changed utterly, but it is unclear if it became
in his eyes tragedy or, instead, comedy to be reckoned with. Probably both.

Yeat’s comparing in “Easter 1916” the poet’s naming of the dead rebels to a mother’s naming of her tired child is
perhaps borrowed from Pearse’s exaltation of mother and child in general and from his eve-of-insurrection poem “The
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Mother”. Yeats repeats Pearse’s mother’s prediction and bids fair to fulfil it. Yeat’s telling of the names of the dead is
the bard’s obligation but it is also something of an Easter duty.

It is of course the Yeatsian hesitations, evasions, ambiguities, the querying qualifying the declamatory, that set “Easter
1916” off from its contemporaries among poems about the Rising. The poem is as concerned with modifying and
advancing a canon as with celebrating an event, and assumes the insurgents into the Yeatsian scheme of things in a
vivid, complicated and arresting way.

“Easter 1916” has been accurately called a palinode to “September 1913”, a retraction of that poem’s lament. In
“Easter 1916” it is precisely the merchant and clerk who usher in a new dispensation, having maintained behind
“counter or desk among grey/ Eighteenth-century houses” their “vivid faces”.

When Yeats writes “All changed, changed utterly”, by “all”, does he mean “all of the present” or “all of the present
and the past”? “All” refers only to the rebels themselves, and they inhabited, until their deaths, the present. They have
been changed “Now and in time to be”, which suggests that they have reached an ultimate, unchangeable condition;
this condition, new and final to them, may be a periodic transformation recognizable throughout Irish history. The
order such men inevitably usher in may be destined itself to change, even if it is unprecedented; even should the
content of Irish history have been newly-minted by the Rising, its form may well have been reconfirmed.

When he speaks of the stone that can induce changes in the substances around it, Yeats, the student of alchemy, may
have in mind the philosopher’s stone. Less debatably, Yeats in “Easter 1916” was surely remembering, or re-
discovering, what he write in 1910 in “The symbolism of Poetry”: “we should come to understand that the beryl stone
was enchanted by our fathers, that it might unfold the pictures in its heart, and not to mirror our own excited faces,
or the boughs waving outside the window. With this change of substance, this return to imagination, would come a
change of style”.

Were we to “stand” upon the stone we would, like the fisherman, know wisdom, calmness, a childlike simplicity. Yeats
wanted to write for his dreamed fisherman a poem worthy of the fisherman’s contemplative and coldly passionate
pursuit, as he wishes to write a poem worthy of Pearse and MacDonagh and their calm, unswerving dedication to an
imagined insurrection.

Like the rebels, Yeats believes he must direct his attention away from subjective expression and objective observation
of the natural world to essential images. But the poet does not have the rebels’ singlemindedness, and were he to, it
would only be through their example; hence the tone in “Easter 1916” of reluctant admiration of, and gratitude for,
qualities, the poet feels he lacks.

However ancient or new seemed the Easter Rising to Yeats, it was swiftly but painfully absorbed into a philosophy, a
symbolism, an aesthetic.

It appears from “Easter 1916” that Yeats thought of the rebels with whom he was acquainted not just as men of action
but as players who exchanged one role before the Rising for a completely different one during the Rising.

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