All Changed, Changed Utterly

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:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

So begins William Butler Yeats’s “Easter, 1916,” the most complex, ambivalent, and enthralling political poem of the twentieth century. But Yeats was not among the rebels and republicans in Dublin when he wrote it; he had not in fact “met them at close of day” for some time. When he heard the news of the Easter Rising, he was at a friend’s cabin in the Cotswolds, and he soon returned to his home at 5 Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, where he had been living since 1895. He made periodic trips to the capital to manage the affairs of the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded, but if he found any inspiration in Ireland he found it in the woods and streams of Coole in the far west, where he spent his summers, and not in the cramped, petty world of Dublin literature and politics. He was fifty years old and largely disillusioned with his youthful nationalism. “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave,” he had spat in a poem written three years earlier.

Now news, gossip, and rumor trickled into London and a dreadful picture slowly became clear: the city center of Dublin taken and barricaded, a republic declared, thousands of British troops massing on the outskirts, Britain declaring martial law in turn, heavy fighting in the streets, gunboats on the Liffey, artillery pounding St Stephen’s Green, hundreds dead, and then—failure, surrender, custody, court-martial, and execution. Men Yeats had known personally, men he had sparred with in the papers and toasted with in the pubs, were marched one by one into a dismal, high-walled stone courtyard and shot dead. One of them, James Connolly, had been injured in the leg during the fighting and couldn’t stand. He was shot sitting down.

“I am very despondent about the future,” Yeats wrote to his friend and patron Lady Gregory, a few days after the events. “At this moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature & criticism from politics.” He locked himself in Woburn Walk, claiming he was too sick even to attend the funeral of his friend Mabel Beardsley (sister of Aubrey). He had already begun to write “a poem on the men executed” and had come up with something close to its central refrain, as he put it in a letter of May 11: “terrible beauty has been born.”

Yet “Easter, 1916” was not finished until September 25, almost exactly four months after the uprising began. Reading it, one can see why Yeats struggled to wrestle it into shape. It is no straightforward elegy for the valiant martyrs, but is rather shot through with a deep sense of uncertainty, the product of months of tormented reflection. Richard Ellmann’s Yeats: The Man and the Masks, one of the first major biographical studies of Yeats, highlights how throughout his life Yeats created various personae which he set in dialogue across his body of work; here a dreamy and reflective loner, there a fiery orator and public figure, all of them together making up a man in his full complexity. In parts of “Easter, 1916” one can almost hear the barroom argument among these various masks, one thrilled by heroic bloodshed, one appalled at the loss of life, one somewhere in between.

After the regret and self-criticism of the opening lines, Yeats begins to describe the men and women he knew, who in all their flaws have been transfigured by their sacrifice into symbols. The second stanza begins:

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?

This rather callous description is our first signal that “Easter, 1916” will not be your standard catalogue of fallen heroes. “That woman” is Constance Markievicz, née Constance Gore-Booth, who Yeats had known since childhood. Both were members of the Anglo-Protestant Ascendancy, but while the Yeats family was merely well-off, the Gore-Booths—Constance and her sister Eva—were full-on aristocrats, and like a surprising number of aristocratic young ladies, they adopted radical views. Eva devoted herself to the suffragist cause, moved to Manchester, and lived as a more-or-less out lesbian, while Constance stayed in Ireland and became involved in nationalist politics (her surname came from a Polish count, who she had married while studying art in Paris). Yeats’s feelings towards both strong women and his own class position were complicated to say the least, and there seems to have been some remnant of Ascendancy snobbery in his resentment of the “shrill” Markievicz for abandoning her youthful beauty and aristocratic life. (To “ride to harriers” is to hunt with hounds.) This side of him reemerged in his 1927 elegy for her and her sister, in which he condemned her for having spent “lonely years / Conspiring among the ignorant.”

To Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the uprising, Yeats gives only two lines of commemoration:

This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;

He reserves more praise for Thomas MacDonagh, a writer and teacher who worked closely with Pearse.

This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.

Yet reading about Pearse, one cannot help but think that it was his sacrifice which troubled Yeats the most, for Yeats, had things gone differently, might have been him. Pearse was another writer and poet, another aloof, dreamy man who became enthralled with Irish language and mythology. One might think this would have made him a natural ally for the youthful Yeats, whose early poems and plays conjured a languorous “Celtic Twilight” world of faeries, spirits, and legendary heroes. But to Pearse, Yeats’s decision that the Irish Literary Revival would be conducted in English (for he had no Irish) represented a betrayal.

If we once admit the Irish literature is English idea, then the language movement is a mistake. [...] Against Mr Yeats personally we have nothing to object. He is a mere English poet of the third or fourth rank, and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre it is time for him to be crushed.

This was in 1899; in later years the two mended their quarrel and several times worked together at the Abbey. While Yeats the cosmopolitan made his way to London, Pearse went to Rathfarnham, on the outskirts of Dublin, and founded St. Enda’s, a progressive, bilingual school that would be an alternative to the rigid National School system, which he regarded as an English institution. Former teachers and students at St. Enda’s remember the sense of camaraderie and pride that the Irish-centered curriculum gave to the students, and the free and democratic atmosphere engendered by the lack of British institutions like corporal punishment and the prefect system. But a trace of the impulse that would drive Pearse to his martyrdom was already evident. Above the doors of St. Enda’s were written the words of the mythical warrior Cúchulainn: “I care not though I were to live but one day and one night, provided my fame and my deeds live after me.”

Though solitary and introspective, Pearse was a skilled public speaker, and in August 1915 he was called upon by the militant Irish Republican Brotherhood to speak at the funeral of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, one of the last men standing from the IRB’s first generation, who had died in exile in New York after a long stay in a British prison. Dressed in a green military uniform, working without notes, he stood by the coffin of the old Fenian and gave the following oration, the final words of which became a revolutionary slogan:

This is a place of peace, sacred to the dead, where men should speak with all charity and with all restraint; but I hold it a Christian thing, as O’Donovan Rossa held it, to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression – and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them. [...] The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but—the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead; and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

This was eight months before the Rising. Pearse was deeply in debt and worried he might have to close the school; these pressures had made him more militant, even messianic. He became obsessed with the example of Robert Emmet, a charismatic orator who led an ill-fated revolt against the British in 1803, and who had hidden in Rathfarnham for a time before his capture and execution. “It was the spirit of Emmet who led me to these hillsides,” he wrote, and he later claimed, in a tone that made it eerily unclear whether he was speaking metaphorically or literally, to have seen Emmet walking the grounds of St. Enda’s.

Yeats, in a letter just after the Rising, described Pearse as “a man made dangerous by the Vertigo of Self Sacrifice. He has moulded himself on Emmet.” Ezra Pound, describing Yeats’s views to another correspondent, claimed Yeats “said for years that Pearse was half-cracked and that he wouldn’t be happy until he was hanged. He seemed to think Pearse had Emmet mania, same as some other lunatics think they are Napoleon or God.” Yeats and Pearse had both identified with Cúchulainn and other old Irish heroes, and used their mythic resonance as material for their poetry, but Yeats’s study of the occult led him to read widely in a variety of traditions and disciplines, and move beyond his infatuation with Ireland’s past. In Pearse, Yeats perhaps saw a warning of who he might have become if he had allowed that infatuation to harden into a suicidal romanticism.

The most striking lines in the second stanza of “Easter, 1916” are those about Major John MacBride:

This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

This is one of the most thrillingly human moments of the poem; who among us has not grudgingly admitted to having misjudged an enemy, and, in order to salvage our own pride, slipped in a few final insults with our admission of error? Yet to anyone who knew the poet and his circle, even a qualified admission of MacBride’s heroism would still have been shocking, for Yeats held a true hatred for him. Unlike the other martyrs of the uprising, MacBride was not a writer or an intellectual or an aesthete but a handsome and vigorous soldier. Known as “Foxy Jack” for his red hair and beard, he had led an Irish volunteer brigade against the British in the Boer war, returned to Dublin a hero, and become a spokesman for the republican cause, exemplifying the kind of boorish, chest-thumping nationalism Joyce later satirized in Ulysses with the figure of the Citizen (and like the Citizen and many other republicans, he was anti-semitic; when he stood for Parliament in Mayo his candidacy was characterized as “The Gold of the Jews against the Irish Brigade.”)

More importantly, MacBride had married Maud Gonne, “the Irish Joan of Arc,” a great beauty and fiery patriot and Yeats’s lifelong muse. Yeats had been in love with Gonne from nearly the moment they met, had dedicated many poems to her, and had cast her in his plays at the Abbey Theatre. Several times he had asked her to marry him and several times she had rejected him, claiming on separate occasions that marriage was incompatible with her feminist principles, that she had an aversion to sex, and that she was married to the cause of Irish freedom. On the night of February 21, 1903, Yeats was preparing to give a lecture when he was handed a letter from Gonne, informing him that she had just married MacBride in Paris. Thunderstruck, he proceeded to give the lecture, but later recalled that he could not remember a single thing he had said.

“I am getting old [she was 36] and oh so tired and I have found a man who has a stronger will than myself and who at the same time is thoroughly honourable and who I trust,” Gonne wrote in a letter to her sister, “As for Willie Yeats I love him dearly as a friend but I could not for one minute imagine marrying him.” Gonne, like many involved with the republican movement, moved between the world of intellectual and cultural nationalism exemplified by the Abbey and the grim, hard world of revolutionary violence. To Yeats, it must have seemed as if she had definitively chosen the latter over the former, chosen the man of action over the poet and dreamer, and one can imagine the strange mixture of vindication and anguish he must have felt when the marriage came to grief.

It is easy to see how Gonne and MacBride’s shared political commitments, as well as the close quarters occasioned by their two speaking tours of the United States, could have kindled a passion between the two. It is equally easy to see how the marriage was destined for ruin. The domineering Catholic MacBride was by all accounts a drunk and possibly a philanderer, who resented Gonne’s emancipated ways, her insistence on maintaining a correspondence with her former lovers, her ability to travel freely to Ireland, from which he was exiled, and her friendship with Yeats, who he cruelly (but it must be said accurately) referred to as “weeping Willie” and once threatened to shoot. They were living apart by late 1904, with Gonne soon granted a separation by the French court, though not the divorce she had wanted.

Yeats, for his part, loathed MacBride not only for these reasons but because Gonne had told him MacBride had seduced her seventeen-year-old half sister, Eileen Wilson, and molested her eleven-year-old daughter Iseult. The veracity of these accusations has long been contested, with Yeats’s biographer Roy Foster treating them as fact and others pointing out that the French divorce court dismissed them as baseless, conceding only that MacBride had been a drunk. In any case, Yeats believed them to be true, and thus it was a considerable achievement for him to swallow his pride and number MacBride among those who have been “transformed utterly.”

But MacBride, though he was one of the executed men, was not directly involved in the planning of the Easter Rising. It was Pearse and his allies—among them Tom Clarke of the IRB, the Marxist James Connolly, who led the militantly left-wing Irish Citizen Army, and Pearse’s friend and fellow St. Enda’s teacher Thomas MacDonagh—who were planning the action in secret council, against the wishes of many of their fellows. The outbreak of the Great War had dampened enthusiasm for their cause; many young Irishmen had joined the British army and popular sentiment had deemed Germany a more immediate threat than Britain, which in any case had promised to grant Home Rule at the conclusion of the war (the source of Yeats’s lines “For England may keep faith / For all that is done and said.”) A spectacular public action was needed to re-energize the movement while the British mainland was still reeling from the slaughters at Ypres and Gallipoli. O’Donovan Rossa’s lavish public funeral would be the spark; it would remind the men and women of Ireland of all that those who came before them had sacrificed. An armed uprising would compel those men and women to action—whether it ended in the operation’s success, or in the rebels’ martyrdom.

It was to be the latter, which all involved likely knew well before the first communication lines were cut and the first public building was seized. A plan to smuggle German guns and ammunition into Ireland via ship had failed; the ship was intercepted and the aristocratic rebel Sir Roger Casement, who had negotiated the shipment with German officials, was captured the next day. Without their guns and with the British now on high alert, the more moderate republican leaders frantically attempted to cancel the planned uprising, knowing it to be suicidal. Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, and Clarke were resolute: “We start operations at noon today, Monday,” the message to their men read. “Carry out your instructions.”

So it was that about 1,200 men and several dozen women embarked on their quixotic rebellion. They occupied several buildings in the center of Dublin, raising above each a green banner that read “Irish Republic.” Pearse emerged from the captured General Post Office to read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic to a crowd of shoppers and civil servants, who were largely confused and indifferent. Constance Markievicz, in green uniform and ostrich-feather hat and waving a revolver, set herself up on St. Stephen’s Green. MacDonagh and his men occupied a biscuit factory. The historian Peter Hart called the uprising “a unique example of insurrectionary abstract art.”

The surprise, the proclamation, the tricolour, the seized buildings and barricades were all there, but the targets seem almost purely symbolic or even arbitrary: instead of the arsenal, city hall or barracks, they occupied a post office, a bakery, a public park. There was probably some military rationale involved – it’s hard to tell since no record of the plan has survived – but there was certainly no intention of seizing power.

As for MacBride, he claimed that he had joined the uprising essentially by accident. The end of his marriage to Maud Gonne and the vicious accusations she had leveled at him had damaged his reputation, and British authorities, having determined that he posed no threat, had made no attempt to prevent him from returning to Ireland, where he was involved in republican causes only peripherally. That day he had gone into town to meet his brother for lunch and walked straight into the middle of occupied St. Stephen’s Green. Feeling it his duty to fight with the rebels, he joined MacDonagh at the biscuit factory, still in his civilian clothes.

After five days of fighting, Pearse and his men surrendered “to prevent further bloodshed.” The British had pounded the center of Dublin with shells, and hundreds of civilians as well as soldiers were dead. In the aftermath, troops descended on the city, arresting anyone associated with the republican movement and holding hundreds of secret trials. Markievicz, being a woman, was given life in prison (“I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me with my friends,” she told her captors, with typical Ascendancy imperiousness.) Pearse, MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly, Clarke, and others identified as leaders were court-martialed and shot.

The third stanza of “Easter, 1916” does not narrate the story of the Rising, recount heroic deeds, or curse the British oppressors. Instead, it leaves the rebels behind after four lines, shifting to a gorgeous pastoral mode.

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.

Here again Yeats’s ambivalence is on display. The stone of which he speaks is alternately the admirable persistence of the Irish struggle from generation to generation, and a meaningless obsession that hinders the free progress of the natural world, which lives “minute by minute,” free from the tyranny of ideas. Yeats had retreated to Lady Gregory’s estate at Coole to finish the poem, and while he was there he would have walked among the rivers, clouds, and woods, in a world of flux and animal vitality far from the political tumult in Dublin. He had written earlier of his frustration with the way the nationalist cause crept into everything; Ireland, he said, was “like a man diseased who can only think of his disease.” Thus the pastoral imagery of the stanza constitutes a subtle argument in itself. These causes that so many men and women were willing to kill and die for— what did they matter to the moor-hens and moor-cocks?

By the next stanza, the stone has assumed a darker meaning.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;

Yeats recognizes that his role as a poet is to “murmur name upon name,” to memorialize the dead. But doubts continue to creep in. Just as living for the cause made Markievicz “shrill,” so too can it dull one’s sensitivity to life, make “a stone of the heart.” “Was it needless death after all?” This question becomes more urgent when one learns of the Rising’s many civilian casualties, including 40 children. It was the British who chose to shell the heavily populated center of Dublin, but the rebels nevertheless must have known that it was not solely their own lives they were choosing to sacrifice for their cause.

When Maud Gonne read “Easter, 1916,” soon after it was written, she was incensed.

My dear Willie,

No I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you & above all it isn’t worthy of the subject [...] There are beautiful lines in your poem, as there are in all you write but it is not a great WHOLE, a living thing which our race would treasure & repeat, such as a poet like you might have given to your nation & which would have avenged our material failure by its spiritual beauty.

You will be angry perhaps that I write so frankly what I feel, but I am always frank with my friends & though our ideals are wide apart we are still friends.

It is understandable that Gonne thought a poem that wondered whether their deaths were “needless” was a poor tribute to the martyrs and she certainly would have no illusions about England keeping faith. But, if we may venture to say so to one who lost so much in the struggle, history has proved Gonne wrong. It is precisely the poem’s inclusion of all that periods of revolutionary violence contain—sacrifice and heroism and foolhardy, needless death alike—that has caused it to endure. It does not avenge material failure by spiritual beauty—what could?—but it is, contrary to Gonne’s prediction, treasured and repeated to this day.

After finishing the poem at Lady Gregory’s estate, Yeats put “Easter, 1916” into a preliminary contents page for his next collection, The Wild Swans at Coole, but then withdrew it; the wound was still too fresh. It was circulated privately among friends, and did not see publication until the New Statesman printed it in 1920, by which time the unrest in Ireland had metastasized into a full-blown guerrilla war, the culmination of the country’s long struggle for independence. Yeats’s final claim had proved accurate:

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

For most of human history, poetry was, in Ezra Pound’s words, “the tale of the tribe,” a common stock of stories which served to reaffirm group identity and culture, memorized and recited and passed down by a specialized class of bard. For a comparatively small part of the lifetime of our species, it has been the expression of a singular consciousness and its movement from one state of mind to another. In “Easter, 1916” Yeats managed to unify these two strains of the poetic tradition: its premodern function as collective memory and its modern function as an expression of the tumult and dialectical clash of individual thought. It is a heroic epic turned into an individual lyric, held together by language of supreme simplicity and beauty. In an introduction to “Easter, 1916” in The Atlantic, the poet David Barber wrote the following:

An insular political tragedy in another time, a poet bent on atoning for his past silences, a eulogy rife with regional and generational allusions—why should "Easter 1916" have any vital claim on us, now so far removed from its griefs and its grievances? The most persuasive answer, I'd contend, is auditory. [...] [T]he general reader can immediately appreciate the architecture of its orchestration with little or no grounding in Yeatsian arcana or the “Irish question.” Its command lies not in its attitudes so much as in its acoustics: the quietly throbbing insistence of the poem’s three-beat measure, the unobtrusively interlacing pattern of a-b-a-b rhymes, the tug and surge of colloquial syntax winding with sinuous fluency over the sharply enjambed lines, the ringing and increasingly disquieting refrain that tolls like a summons, as if from a desolate parish steeple or some moss-shrouded stone tower.

This is quite true, and beautifully expressed. And yet the vivid imagery and the slow, inevitable rhythm of the poem compel one not just to enjoy the acoustics but to place oneself in Yeats’s time, and to learn more about the struggle that so occupied his mind. For my part, I have no Irish ancestry and no connection to the 110-year-old events of which he spoke, but because of my encounter with “Easter, 1916,” (as well as those of the many biographers and historians I consulted to better understand the poem) I now know much more about the events he commemorated, and have a living picture in my head of these historical personages: dreamy Pearse, loutish MacBride, sensitive MacDonagh, fierce Maud Gonne and fiery Constance Markievicz and all the rest. Anyone who studies Yeats’s poetry will soon run up against his dizzyingly complex occult system, full of gyres and Great Wheels and the cycles of the moon, which I do not pretend to understand. But it seems to me that all of his magical obsessions, whatever spells he thought he was working, are mere sleight-of-hand compared to his achievement in “Easter, 1916,” a work which, because of its doubt and ambiguity and essential humanity, has ensured that “MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse” will live on in our collective memory, now and in time to be.