Poetry: Easter 1916

Overview
William Butler Yeats’s "Easter 1916" commemorates the Irish nationalist uprising of April 24, 1916, and records the poet’s conflicted response to the event and its martyrs. The poem chronicles a transformation in both public life and Yeats’s own estimation of people he once dismissed as ordinary or trivial, culminating in the haunting refrain: "All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born". It is at once an elegy for the dead, a meditation on the moral costs of revolution, and a reckoning with how history can suddenly elevate familiar figures into tragic symbols.

Structure and Progression
Composed in four stanzas whose alternating lengths echo the date of the Rising (16 and 24 lines), the poem moves from casual description to moral inquiry and memorial. In the opening stanza, the speaker recalls passing acquaintances at dusk outside gray Georgian houses, exchanging polite talk and even mockery. These figures, once part of the city’s "casual comedy", have been irrevocably altered by their choice to rebel and die. The second stanza widens into parable and pattern, setting flowing, mutable life against the fixity of purpose the rebels embraced. The third brings individual portraiture into focus, while the final stanza wrestles with whether their sacrifice was necessary and how it should be held in memory.

Figures and Naming
Yeats sketches several participants with delicate indirection before some are named. A woman whose charitable zeal turns strident suggests the Countess Markievicz. "This man had kept a school" evokes Patrick Pearse; "and rode our winged horse" points to poet Thomas MacDonagh. The poem also confronts Yeats’s personal animus toward John MacBride, "a drunken, vainglorious lout" who had wronged someone "near my heart", yet the poet insists on honoring him: "Yet I number him in the song". In the culminating roll-call, the refrain embraces "MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse", inscribing them into national memory "now and in time to be, wherever green is worn".

Images and Refrain
The poem’s central image contrasts the living stream of nature, clouds, horses, birds, moor-hens, with a stubborn stone that "troubles" its flow. Yeats adapts this to human will: "Hearts with one purpose alone" turn to stone, becoming fixed in a single, consuming aim. This fixity grants heroic resolve but also hardens the heart, a double edge expressed again in the fourth stanza’s warning: "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart". Against this, the refrain functions as a choral judgment and a paradox. Beauty arises from devotion and courage, yet it is "terrible" because it demands death and leaves grief. The refrain’s recurrence after each turn of thought keeps the poem suspended between admiration and dread.

Doubt, Duty, and Memory
In the final movement, Yeats asks whether the deaths were needlessly provoked by miscalculation, "Was it needless death after all?", but refuses to pronounce a final verdict. He returns to what can be known and borne: "We know their dream; enough to know they dreamed and are dead". The poem shifts from judgment to ritual, instructing the living to "murmur name upon name" and to remember precisely: not to idealize blindly, nor to deny the cost, but to honor the dreamers who made history surge. The closing lines bind the rebels to Ireland’s colors and to future generations, while keeping intact the poem’s uneasy balance between glory and catastrophe. In compressing public commemoration and private ambivalence, "Easter 1916" turns a political event into a lasting meditation on how sacrifice transforms both a nation’s fate and the poet’s own heart.