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Yeats, William Butler: "Easter, 1916"

MAY 16, 2024

BY NR.BALOCH

A man who was conflicted about politics wrote one of the most potent political poems of the 20th century. William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was captivated by the late Victorian era when he started his career. The majority of that era's art was romantic rather than realistic. The word "spell" is pertinent in this context because Yeats converted to Theosophy in 1887 and became an acolyte of Russian magician Madame Blavatsky. For the remainder of his life, he engaged in a variety of spiritualist activities, such as séances and automatic writing. His early poetry, such as the well-known lyric poems "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and "The Song of Wandering Aengus," showcase his love of Celtic mythology and Gaelic sagas. In Ireland at the time, nationalism was pervasive in all its forms, but Yeats preferred

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Yeats become increasingly realistic or possibly disillusioned in his middle years. When Ezra Pound published his imagist manifesto and started serving as Yeats's unofficial secretary in 1913, as Virginia Woolf noted, "human character changed"; Yeats's crisis was sparked by the unstoppable artistic revolutions of Modernism and resulted in a leaner style and a wider scope. In honor of his friend and nationalist John O'Leary, he penned the political and intimate poem "September 1913," which featured the refrain "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, / It's with O'Leary in the grave." Three years later, right as he started composing "Easter, 1916," Yeats said that the poem "sounds old-fashioned now." His political involvement increased with the poem, which also represented a creative breakthrough. Its inventiveness was based on

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The first verse of the poem makes clear that the focus is on the Modernist rather than the picturesque Ireland:

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: …

Readers are in the present of the modern metropolis (for Yeats, it was Dublin), as in Ezra Pound's “apparition of these faces in the crowd” in the Paris subway or Eliot's London “city block... trampled by insistent feet / At four and five and six o'clock”. Yeats's fellow countrymen and citizens ("I have met them") emerge from a scene of buildings, counters, and desks to an evening of urban entertainment in the clubs where people engage in repartee and gossip, where "motley" refers to both the court jester's costume and the city's diverting diversions. Yeats gave readers just a few words to imagine a generic "them," but as we'll see, this group of gregarious Dubliners will give rise to four unique individuals. The change from the typical

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The Easter Rising, also known as the Easter Rebellion of 1916, which saw about a thousand Irish Republicans seek to create an independent Ireland by breaking away from Great Britain, was the "change." Less than a week later, the uprising was put down, and several of its leaders were quickly put to death by firing squad. Even though the general public did not support the first insurrection, the British response's brutality unsettled the Irish and facilitated the rise of Sinn Féin, an ultranationalist organization. Months later, Yeats remarked, "I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me." He wrote to Lady Gregory after the May 1916 courts-martial and executions, stating that he was "trying to write a poem." 

Through the poem, Yeats traced the evolution of hard-nosed realism toward mythology. The second stanza honors the rebels that Yeats knew personally: “that woman” is Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz, a nationalist politician; “this man” is poet Patrick Pearse, a leader of the insurrection; “his helper and friend” is poet Thomas MacDonagh; and “the drunken, vainglorious lout” is John MacBride, the violent former husband of Maud Gonne. They were not portrayed in a positive light by Yeats, who criticized Markievicz for being too loud and called MacBride disgusting. He said that the two poets would have been better off staying as teachers and authors. Yeats, however, grudgingly acknowledged in the first stanza that everyone "resigned his part / In the casual comedy" of daily existence. The ability to pursue one's own happiness and liberty—the "casual comedy"

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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.

This line, with its poetic depictions of nature, calls to mind a centuries-old pastoral custom. Above all, the pastoral aims to portray the tranquility of the natural world. There's a catch, though: rather than seeing a scene of unchanging tranquility, we see one in which movement and change are part of the natural order. Violence results from the stone's unnatural fixation, which "troubles" the water's flow. It is soulless, or "inanimate," whereas the Latin word for soul, anima, is the source of animation, or the state of being "full of life." According to Yeats, revolutionaries who have "one purpose alone"—that is, a single philosophy, ideal, or objective—appear soulless.

Yeats conveys a frightening swiftness in his poem. With its multiple lines of seven syllables, the poem's rhythm is mystical and defies categorization. It has been called free verse, iambic trimeter, and a trimeter with an unfulfilled tetrameter lurking behind it. Poetry with "metrical forms that seemed old enough to have been sung by men half-asleep or riding upon a journey" was highly valued by him. Yeats clarified in his 1900 essay "The Symbolism of Poetry":

Rhythm, in my opinion, serves the dual purpose of holding us awake through variety and hushing us with an enticing monotony, prolonging the moment of contemplation—the one moment when we are awake and asleep—and keeping us in that possibly real trance where the mind is freed from the pressure of the will and is revealed through symbols.

The fact that we are unable to identify his hypnotic measure is a sign of its antiquated strength. The poem appears to have been produced entirely on its own; there aren't many changes in the first draft until the fourth stanza. It also demonstrates whence Yeats originally described how the cloud's shadow is "changed" on the stream. Yeats emphasizes the action of individual actors in a totality that "are changed, changed utterly" (italics mine) by rewriting it in the active voice. Even though the pieces are working together, this interaction produces the total passively. This is important in a poetry on historical destiny because it suggests that everyone contributes to the creation of their own destiny, even though the result is uncertain.

If Yeats struggled hardest to write the final stanza, as the manuscript reveals, it's probably because its summing thesis is hard to explain and even harder to take in. It's an elegy for the deceased. In three different ways, he poses his last, desperate question:

O when may it suffice?
…
Was it needless death after all?
…
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

Yeats does not think it is worth making the cost. Because peace is never a stable state, change is continual, and more sacrifice is always possible, there is never a permanent end to the sacrifices that can be made. It's possible that this specific sacrifice wasn't necessary because, in 1916, Great Britain was likely prepared for a protracted diplomatic settlement of the Republican dispute. In 1914, it had put Ireland's Home Rule measure on hold but pledged to bring it back once the fighting had died down. Ultimately, the poet posed the most horrifying query: may a person's "excess of love" for their nation drive them to death, turning honor and glory into nothing more than confusion?

Yeats invoked the image of a mother calling out her child's name in the dark to drive away these horrifying thoughts. If there's any comfort, it's only in remembrance. "Our part" resurrects the idea that life is like a play, complete with a variety of characters, zany costumes, and the "casual comedy" that turns tragic:

To murmur name upon name,  
As a mother names her child  
…
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse

Yeats describes the origin of these lines in his Autobiography:

One day, at a meeting of members, an elderly Irish member of Parliament made what may have been his last appearance. He sang an impassioned rendition of a ballad he had written in the style of Young Ireland, lamenting that new poets and groups had appropriated something of their holiness while repeatedly reciting his hallowed names, Wolfe Tone, Emmet, and Owen Roe. Although the ballad lacked literary value, I returned home with a troubled conscience. This concern persisted for maybe a dozen years until I realized that our efforts had deepened my understanding of all the factors that reinforce racial inequality. I remembered that former lawmaker as

                                   Our part
To murmur name upon name
As a mother names her child.

According to the poet, the martyrs are memorialized in the collective memory through a formal naming ceremony. Additionally, it is purposefully placed at the very end of the poem to provide a definite crest or peak, while the first and second stanzas merely describe the characters without giving them names. In the last verse, a poet who has drawn strength from the touchstones of nature performs a magical act culminating in the shouting of concrete names. The line "changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born" is repeated to complete the spell (it vanished from the preceding stanza). Just like in lullabies or nursery songs, spells need repetition, circularity, and closure. Repetition is crucial, as James Longenbach notes in The Virtues of Poetry.

The poem was completed by Yeats on September 25, 1916, and was printed in a private edition of 25 copies. However, it was not widely distributed until it was published in the autumn of 1920 in The Dial in New York and The New Statesman in London, as well as in Yeats's subsequent book of poetry, Michael Robartes and the Dancer. One wonders if the poem appeared less connected to a specific event and more ingrained in the historical long view throughout the four years that passed between writing and publication. Its anxious queries on how to end the conflict remained unanswered. The poem's verb tenses start with a quasi-mythic "I have met them," which is very helpful. I have moved on. Suddenly, the speaker says,

It's important to remember that Yeats put off collecting the poem for aesthetic reasons. He wrote his volumes as books and gave careful consideration to the sequence in which the poems were included; he did not want just haphazard collections of poems. "Easter, 1916" appears immediately before Yeats's other poems about the Rebellion, "Sixteen Dead Men," "The Rose Tree," and "On a Political Prisoner." These poems contrast birth and apocalypse, mythical order and historical bloodshed. It also resonates with other well-known single poems in the book, such as "The Second Coming" and "A Prayer for My Daughter." According to Donald Davie, one could only fully comprehend "Easter, 1916" within the framework of the novel. Yeats's poetry was so brilliant that reading one piece inevitably led to reading more and more without

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry," was a famous statement made by Yeats once. As wary of taking revolutionary action as he was, he wrestles with these uncertainties while bemoaning his more audacious allies in "Easter, 1916." Following in the footsteps of elegies like "Lycidas" and "England in 1819," Yeats advocates for writing as a means of preserving collective memory. He fully utilizes the Easter myth that the historical circumstance has bestowed upon him, ritualizing the martyrs and their names via the use of song—meter and rhyme—as well as rhetorical devices. Yeats used ancient magic and Modernist ambivalence to address global events as the experiments of the imagists, vorticists, and surrealists were inspiring artistic rebellions.