A Short Analysis of W. B. Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) wrote ‘Easter 1916’ in the summer of 1916, shortly after the Easter Rising in Dublin and when the events were still fresh in the memory. Yeats had conflicted feelings towards the rising – more details about which can be read here – since he deplored violence (in most cases) as a way of achieving Irish independence from the British.

Analysis

In ‘Easter 1916’, Yeats refers to a number of key figures in the struggle for Irish independence, although without naming them, so the poem requires a bit of analysis and context.

‘A terrible beauty is born’: the words that end three of the four long stanzas that make up ‘Easter 1916’, with each new repetition of them changing them slightly. ‘All changed, changed utterly’. For among other things, ‘Easter 1916’ is about the tension between change and permanence, steadfastness and flexibility – and nowhere is this seen more clearly, perhaps, than in Yeats’s use of the stone in the third and fourth stanzas of ‘Easter 1916’.

This bears closer analysis: in the third stanza, Yeats presents the stone as something dependable and solid in the midst of a ‘living stream’: the waters may flow over it, but the stone remains. Yet in the fourth stanza, the emphasis on the stone shifts slightly:

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?

Summoning the old idiom about a ‘heart of stone’ – used here to describe revolutionaries whose empathy and compassion have been reduced by their dogged commitment to a cause – these lines mark a shift in the poem’s use of the stone as a symbol. What was a symbol of steadfastness is now a symbol of rigid inflexibility, even coldness.

Ironically, the stone, used to suggest something unchanging and constant, has itself changed in the course of the poem. (Note how ‘sacrifice’ and ‘suffice’ do not simply rhyme with each other, too: instead, ‘suffice’ is a thinning out of ‘sacrifice’, as if the grand gesture of renunciation for a cause has given way to something that is merely sufficient. What was once romantic idealism is now a mere matter of sticking to the course and seeing it through to the bitter end – whenever that may come.)

‘Easter 1916’ alludes to a number of specific figures involved in the struggle for Irish independence: the ‘woman’ referred to at the beginning of the second stanza is the Countess Markievicz, whom Yeats knew a little; the lines seem to regret the fact that her ‘voice grew shrill’, the louder and more vocal she became in her espousal for the revolutionary cause (note that Yeats goes on to mention that she once had a ‘sweet’ voice).

The ‘man [who] had kept a school / And rode our wingèd horse’ is Patrick Pearse, while his ‘other helper and friend’ is Thomas MacDonagh. Perhaps the most notable of all of the revolutionaries Yeats alludes to is John MacBride, who is mentioned by name in the final stanza alongside Pearse and MacDonagh: MacBride was the estranged husband of Maud Gonne, Yeats’s muse throughout his life.

Yeats loathed MacBride, and the lines in the second stanza about a ‘drunken, vainglorious lout’ who ‘had done most bitter wrong / To some who are near my heart’ refer to Yeats’s personal reasons for hating MacBride, given his mistreatment of Gonne. The personal and the political are thus combined.

Form and metre

The metre of ‘Easter 1916’ is difficult to analyse because, although it’s largely written in iambic trimeter, there are numerous variations and Yeats doesn’t stick doggedly to the iambic metre. This gives the verse a sense of unpredictability which echoes the revolutionary event the poem responds to. The repeated line, ‘A terrible beauty is born’, which may have been inspired by Ford Madox Ford’s 1915 poem ‘Antwerp’, presents us with an oxymoron that almost calls up the Sublime, and that mixture of awe and terror which so arrested and captivated the Romantics. What will the events of the Easter Rising mean for the future of Ireland? When he wrote ‘Easter 1916’, Yeats could not tell.

In turn, Yeats’s great poem about a momentous point in Irish history would inspire W. H. Auden (who wrote a poem in memory of Yeats in 1939) when writing his poem about another momentous event and another war: ‘September 1, 1939’, about Germany’s invasion of Poland, uses a similar rhyme scheme and metre to that used by Yeats in ‘Easter 1916’.