Easter, 1916

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1921

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Change Versus Stasis

One of Yeats’ primary questions, or aspects of confusion, in “Easter, 1916” is whether the rebels’ actions were ultimately worthwhile, or if their cause was worth the loss of life. He compares their stalwart determination to an unchanging stone in a riverbed but notes that the living world around them is actually one full of change and evolution. He writes, “Minute by minute they change” (Line 48), and revisits a version of that phrase twice more within the third stanza. The stones are not unequivocally good for the stream, but rather they “trouble” it (Line 44), a world with a slightly negative connotation. Later, Yeats names their determination as “excess of love” (Line 72) and posits that this position “Bewildered them till they died” (Line 73). While he values the memorializing of the rebels, he seems to think that their stalwart commitment to the cause is not necessarily a clearly heroic stance.

Resurrection

As an Irishman, Yeats would have understood the significance that an allusion to Easter would hold for his fundamentally Irish Catholic reader base; by calling on the most important event in Christianity, he establishes the stakes of the poem, and contrasts the human experience with the divine. Critic Ange Mlinko points out that the reference to the Christian religious holiday in “Easter, 1916” underscores the incongruity and vacillation Yeats’ feels in response to the Uprising. She writes:

His simultaneous awe of and ambivalence toward the event are clearly coded in both the title and refrain. The Easter Rising is a double entendre on the holiday; the ‘terrible beauty’ was ‘born’ during Holy Week, which marks the occasion of Christ’s sacrifice. Hence, the Easter Rising is simultaneously crucifixion and resurrection, reality, and archetype” (Mlinko, Ange. “William Butler Yeats: ‘Easter, 1916’.” Poetry Foundation, 15 Apr. 2014).

The otherwise celebratory, hopeful holiday is undercut by the violence and tragedy of the Uprising, a duality that Yeats understands is integral to the event and its aftermath.

Power of Naming

Although Yeats expresses ambivalence about the actions of the Uprising’s leaders, he nevertheless finds value in commemorating their actions and cementing them in history. To do this, he names them plainly in the poem. In the second stanza, he describes some of the martyrs of the cause, describing who they were before their deaths, but he does not offer any names. In the final stanza, he says, “our part [is] / To murmur name upon name, / As a mother names her child” (Lines 60-62). The living who remain behind must continue to remember and name the dead, an action that Yeats likens to the careful nurturing of a loving mother, insinuating that this is an act of humanity, intimacy, and love. In the final lines of the poem, he specifies names: “MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse” (Lines 75-76), upholding his commitment to name them and their actions, in all of their fullness and complexity.