The final stanza again focuses on the personal. Their headquarters was the General Post Office (GPO) on O’Connell Street where, close to midday, Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the … Retrieved April 04, 2021 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/easter-1916. Start studying easter 1916 context + quotes. One of the founders of the Irish Citizen Army in 1913 was Protestant Jack White, son of General George White. Easter, 1916 is a poem by W. B. Yeats describing the poet's torn emotions regarding the events of the Easter Rising staged in Ireland against British rule on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. Read the poem aloud. “Easter, 1916” reflects this duality. Second, Roger Casement, a retired British diplomat turned Irish revolutionary, was captured when it was discovered he had been recruiting for the Rising by trying to gather a militia of Irish prisoners of war within Germany. In 1949, Eire became The Republic of Ireland and withdrew from the British Commonwealth. The poem centers around the author’s conflicting emotions about the uprising. In “Easter 1916,” Yeats’s conflict between the public and private spheres is transposed to five of the revolutionaries of the Easter Rising. The speaker asks more questions than he answers, but in so doing, he reproduces the thought processes by which we attempt to deal with loss. Poetry Foundation. While Yeats refrained from condemning the leaders for becoming involved in politics—a realm in which he thought they did not belong—he did, however, regret that. Stead, C. K., “On ‘Easter 1916,’” in Yeats: Poems, 1919-1935, edited by Elizabeth Cullingford, London: Macmillan, 1984, p. 162. First, there is the transition from grey to green. The casual reference to “them” in the first line—a reference made before one knows who “they” are—immediately implicates the reader in the speaker’s drama; it implies that he shares the speaker’s frame of reference, that he knows these persons and places. In two syntactically similar lines (“I have met them at the close of day” and “I have passed with a nod of the head”), the speaker stresses his passing acquaintance with the rebels, almost to convince himself of the fact. While this is not the place to speculate on exactly why Yeats waited to write and publish, some general remarks may be ventured. The mis-categorization of Yeats in Literature Sixteen Sinn Fein men were subsequently executed and one woman was jailed. Five hundred people had died and 77 were executed, 53 more than the British had executed. During his life, Yeats was an Irish nationalist. Ever since its beginnings, literature has glorified and criticized existing military and political figures, inspiring or discouraging those who would learn from their example. Yeats's "Easter 1916," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. Writer. Yeats’s course resembles that of memory itself. On the other hand, “Easter 1916” rises far above “trivial vers de societé” because its analysis of the particular historical event isolates those qualities that are typical of any major political upheaval: the splendor and terror that are the inseparable and inevitable consequences of change. grounds for mocking in the company of more cultured men at the club. In posters, pamphlets, newspapers, and armed demonstrations, dissident Irishmen insisted it was neither Ireland’s duty nor business to fight for a British government that had not even granted Ireland its freedom. Symbolism in W.B. While it might have served Germany’s interest to get behind the Rising in order to cripple Britain, Germany collaborated only to the extent of sending munitions. After an amazingly full and influential life doubled and split by literature and politics, Yeats, in a final letter, described what would be his last aphorism of division: “Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.” He died on January 28, 1939. 1998: Three young, Roman Catholic boys were burned to death in an arson attack in the Protestant village of Ballymoney, Northern Ireland. Where, in stanza three, the hearts of the revolutionaries are hardened to changing life, in stanza four the revolutionaries are said to be bewildered by an excess of love. 1916, A Novel of the Irish Rebellion is a 1998 historical novel by Morgan Llywelyn. One sold for $1 million in 2006. The political poems that he did write were, as his critic Richard Ellmann has noted in his critical survey The Identity of Yeats, “always complicated by his being above politics.” At the time of the insurrection in Dublin, Yeats was not even in Ireland but on an estate in England, having long divided his time between the two countries. While, for Yeats, revolt would have meant troubling self-examination, to the revolutionaries, to not revolt would have meant the same. Rather than viewing the politician as bending with the breezes of public reaction or soft money donations as we might today, Yeats depicts the politician as an argumentative, unyielding, obdurate, “Was [Yeats] bitter because no matter how many plays and poems he wrote, or stories he collected, all in the name of promoting a proud and independent Ireland, literature did not, perhaps could not, have the impact of an event like the Easter Rising?”. Their courage could not be questioned: their judgement might, for it was conceivable that after the war the English might have consented to Home Rule. In the following essay, Meyer notes that “Easter 1916” negotiates between the extremes of art and politics and, through its ambivalence and ambiguities, renders the complexities of the historical event. One of the founders of the Irish Citizen Army in 1913 was Protestant Jack White, son of General George White. Web. Because the question is unanswerable, Yeats says that all we can do is remember the dead (“To murmur name upon name”) as when a mother utters the name of her sleeping child to make sure he awakens and remains with her. First, there are the pairings. By 1937, when Yeats was asked if he believed in the images and structures of his occult system as illustrated in the text A Vision, he would only say, “Oh, I draw from it images for my poetry.”. To dramatize their metamorphosis over the course of the first two sections, Yeats draws his metaphors from the world of drama. Encyclopedia.com. The speaker is forced into the action. Identity politics are important to the understanding of his poem “Easter, 1916” because they play an important part in how Yeats sees himself and the world around him. The flaming gas bomb that killed them is believed to have been thrown by a Protestant angry that a Protestant march through a Catholic neighborhood was banned by the British. © 2019 Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. During his life, Yeats was an Irish nationalist. “’Of What Is Past, Or Passing, Or To Come’: Engaging Yeatsian Temporality In ‘Easter 1916’.” Forum For World Literature Studies 3 (2015): 461. After Yeats’s death, Gonne claimed that “Without Yeats there would have been no Literary In line 59, Yeats himself turns to sympathy. From this conflict arises crises of identity politics throughout the poem. As Yeats remembers them, they are all too human—idiosyncratic, full of promise, and beset by weaknesses. The Easter Rising in the spring of April 1916 and the execution deaths of sixteen revolutionary leaders a short time later mark the transition from an old, dying, politically unmotivated country (grey) to an Ireland reborn through martyrdom (green). The recitation of the revolutionaries’ names in the last stanza is like so many names upon the walls of war memorials or on AIDS quilts. Yeats], “This Irish business has been a great grief. Yeats’s Nations : Gender, Class, And Irishness. Have students read the opening paragraphs of Mlinko’s poem guide. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. The poet Patrick Pearse, one of fifteen militant nationalists jailed and executed for his role in the failed Easter Rising of 1916, believed with a nearmessianic fervor, as noted in his Plays, Stories, Poems, that only those willing to die “in bloody protest for a glorious thing” could bring Ireland to the brink of independence. Additional incidents would have to take their course, people would have to be listened to, and thoughts sifted. The choice of characters is extremely odd. Yeats, William Butler. "Easter 1916" Historical Context: W.B. DIED: 1972, Enfield, Conn. In works such as Katherine Kodani and Neville F. Newman we see how his early life and experiences shaped his later poetry, including “Easter, 1916.” In Marjorie Perloff and Seongho Yoon’s works, we narrow the focus down into how Yeats goes about to establishing the events of the poem in the context of his personal feelings towards the uprising. The final period of Yeats professional life starts in 1910 with his poem “The Green Helmet.” During the final stage of his career Yeats writes some of the poetry he terms occasional poems. ———, Letters, edited by Allan Wade, London, 1954, pp. Despite the lines that recall Hamlet’s self-deluding take on mortality— “To die, to sleep— / To sleep / perchance to dream”, “‘Easter 1916’ is a poem that traverses the dangerous ground between art and politics, bringing both into a peaceable accord.”, (Hamlet 3.1.64-65)—the deaths of the patriots are unassailable facts. The small-talk of acquaintances or passerby does not interest him much. In the early 1900s, Ireland was governed by the parliament of the United Kingdom and under the rule of Great Britain [1].A campaign in Ireland began in 1870 and continued through 1918, the end of World War 1, called the Home Rule Movement. Yeats conveys this dynamism, this ceaseless flux, not only through the exhaustiveness of his catalogue (which includes horses, riders, birds, clouds, moor-hens, and moor-cocks) but through a single elaborately structured sentence marked by alliteration (“longlegged”), strong consonantal verbs (range, change, slides, plashes, dive, call, and the verb that encompasses all of the preceding, live), as well as galloping triple meters that hasten the movement of the lines and replicate the flow of “the living stream.” Through syntax alone, all living things are linked in a single, cohesive whole. Historical Context. Ward, Allan, J., The Easter Rising: Revolution and Irish Nationalism, Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing, 1995. Caulfield, Max, The Easter Rebellion, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963. Wilson). Perhaps Yeats even considered transforming the troubling stone of stanza three into the rock of commitment at the end of “Easter 1916.” But this would have clashed with the three refrains describing utter change and transformation, even risked privileging constancy over change. It veers, fast-paced, into the moment of the confrontation. From another viewpoint—after the Rising and the quick execution of its leaders—the public and private do not look so far apart, because it can be said that these men and this woman died for something that, before it became extremely public, was passionately private. This period is referred to as his more mature professional period. Even with Yeats’s appended date, critics disagree as to when the poem was written. While an occupying force of 400 British troops stood duty in Dublin, Patrick Pearse and James Connolly led a company of 150 men—part of a total force of 1,500 volunteers from the Irish Citizen’s Army and the Irish Volunteers—through downtown Dublin from Liberty Hall to the General Post Office a short distance away. We have lost the ablest and most fine-natured of our young men. Newman, Neville F. “Yeats’s Easter 1916.” The Explicator 3 (2002): 145. Home Thesis Historical Context Timeline Historical Figures Research Home Thesis Historical Context Timeline Historical Figures Research Search by typing & pressing enter. After the Rising and Britain’s quick execution of the sixteen leaders in May, Irish independence demanded resolution if Britain was going to win the war. Yeats is immediately present in the poem, “meeting” other men, “passing,” “nodding,” “lingering,” and “mocking.” The political event that is the occasion for this poem is not viewed from the outside ...; the center is rather the “I” who must come to terms with the public event. Yeats believed in the need for a barrier between political and private life, because he thought that politics would coarsen and corrupt the individual. The speaker acknowledges what is happening in his world and to some degree wants to be a part of it but at the same time feels he is above the people he encounters on a daily basis. By identifying and defining the otherness of people, in this case, the Irish who wanted liberty at the cost of human sacrifice, there is a clear pattern and path to follow. What has “changed, changed utterly” is the speaker’s attitude toward the leaders, who are no longer the objects of scorn and mockery, but compassion. Timm, Eitel, W. B. Yeats: A Century of Criticism, Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1987. The crucial question must finally be asked: “Was it needless death after all? The historical context of ‘Easter Uprising’ helps understand the symbolism better as the symbol of ‘terrible beauty’ has its ground on the events that are related to history. Neither a major figure in the Rising, nor, like Con Markiewicz, Pearse, and MacDonagh, a symbol of tragically wasted potential, MacBride has a significance for Yeats that is purely personal: he was Maud Gonne’s estranged husband, the man who “had done most bitter wrong” to the woman Yeats adored. After the Easter Rising of 1916 and Irish independence, Yeats served as an Irish Senator from 1922-28, and in 1923, won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Easter Rising was timed to coincide with Christ’s rising. Yeats is undialectical, change being all good and constancy being all bad. “This man” was Patrick Pearse, the founder of a boy’s school in Dublin and the Commandant-General and President of the provisional government during the Rising. The particular occasion is endowed with universal significance. But with them, the narrator engages in only small talk. They drive us forward but the rhyme and repetition remind us of the fixed. Whatever drove them more— love or hate—is anybody’s guess. The historical context of ‘Easter Uprising’ helps understand the symbolism better as the symbol of ‘terrible beauty’ has its ground on the events that are related to history. Yeats wrote "Easter 1916" in May-September 1916 following the aftermath of the Easter Rising, although the poem was not published until 1921. The National Library of Ireland explains on its website, “following the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the Irish Republican Brotherhood decided to stage an insurrection at the next opportune moment, bearing in mind the maxim of England’s difficulty being Ireland’s opportunity.”. YOUR CART. Structured around antitheses and embodying a host of contradictions, “Easter 1916” is as paradoxical as the oxymoronic aphorism “terrible beauty” that echoes through its refrains, for it expresses not only Yeats’s disapproval but his approval of the activists he had once decried. Loftus, Richard J., Nationalism in Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964. Whereas it was hard for Yeats to deny the deep impact of the rising on his outlook, he could not help feeling perturbed by both the outbreak and aftermath of the Rising” (Yoon). It was the beginning of a week-long attempt by Irish rebels to end British control in Ireland. On the other hand, he, in effect, admits the strategy has been productive because it brought about “utter change” and a “terrible beauty.” Perhaps Yeats even wonders whether insurrection was more effective than merely murmuring “name upon name ... MacDonagh and MacBride / Connolly and Pearse” as he did in “Easter 1916.” Why did Yeats not simply praise the heroes of the Rising and accept his inability to do what they did? Among them was W. B. Yeats. In “Easter 1916,” then, Yeats solves a problem which Arnold attempted but failed to solve in “Haworth Churchyard.” Arnold wanted to assimilate the historical and documentary, to absorb the public event into the fabric of the romantic lyric. they had. The 1916 Easter Rising damaged a variety of public and professional buildings and spaces in Dublin. The symbol of ‘terrible beauty’ , ‘the stone’ , and the colour ‘green’ through preordained energies and long associations severally, evokes certain emotions related to the historical context of the ‘Easter Uprising’ of 1916. In the natural world, birds, horses, clouds, and water are in perpetual free movement; there is constant sliding, plashing, and mating: “hens to moorcocks call.” But the “Hearts with one purpose alone” of the 1916 leaders have been “enchanted to a stone”—a spell has been cast upon them by their total absorption in a Utopian vision until they become rigid, inflexible, petrified—ultimately beyond change. With the passage of time, Yeats could more easily forgive the leaders of the Rising and even praise them. With time, memory—unless the self suffers a major blow that provokes revenge—sluffs off its anger and keeps its fondness, usually an easier emotion. 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