“Easter, 1916” is one of Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s most famous poems. The poem was written about an event known as the “Easter Rising.” On Easter Sunday of 1916, a group of Irish Republicans who wanted an independent Irish republic rebelled against British control of the country. They seized buildings in central Dublin and proclaimed Ireland independent. The relatively small group of 1,800 nationalist revolutionaries fought against British troops, but within a week 450 were dead. More than half of these were civilians caught in the middle. After six days, the rebels surrendered. The leaders were executed by firing squad and many other participants were hanged. Yeats was invested in Irish identity, but he was not in favor of violent rebellion for the cause of independence. Yet he was emotionally impacted by the Easter Rising. As he wrote to a friend of his at the time, “I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me.” The poem “Easter, 1916” discusses Yeats’s complex feelings about the event.
Yeats finished writing the poem in September 1916 while the executions of the rebels by the British were continuing. It was first published privately in a print run of only 25 copies. Then in 1920, it was republished in the journal The New Statesmen in London and The Dial in New York. Finally, Yeats included the poem in his book Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). This collection of poetry includes several other political works. The most famous of these are “The Second Coming” and “A Prayer for My Daughter.” There are also three other poems about the Easter Rising: “Sixteen Dead Men,” “The Rose Tree,” and “On a Political Prisoner.”
Yeats began his career in the Victorian era. He wrote not political poetry but rather works inspired by the English Romantic poets like Percy Shelley and William Blake. He wrote about Celtic mythology and folklore as well as lyric poems about the Irish countryside. “Easter, 1916” does not show the idealized Ireland of Gaelic tales but rather the modern, messy world of Dublin in the 1910s. According to poet and critic Ange Mlinko, this poem’s “innovation rested in Yeats’s ability to preserve older techniques that gave his verse its power—incantatory rhythm, rhyme, symbolism, and allegory—while engaging frankly with the interplay of personality, history, and politics of the present.” This combination of traditional technique and modern content has made this poem one of Yeats’s most famous. The repeated chorus “a terrible beauty is born” is one of English-language poetry’s most recognizable lines. The poem also builds the date of the Easter Rising into the structure of the poem. It has 16 lines in two of the stanzas (for the year 1916), 24 lines in the other two (for the 24th of April), and four stanzas in total (for the fourth month of the year).
The poem discusses the events of the Easter Rising by focusing on four people who were involved: Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas MacDonagh, and John MacBride. All were central participants in the Easter Rising and all were executed by the British army in 1916. The poem also references Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz. She was a suffragette and Irish nationalist involved in the rebellion. The poem describes how these people, the city of Dublin, and the wider world were all transformed by these events. It argues that after the Easter Rising, “All [is] changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.” The poem reveals an ambivalent attitude towards the uprising. On the one hand, it has transformed the world. On the other, it is unclear whether things have changed for the better. Though the speaker of the poem, like Yeats himself, does not approve of the violent tactics and heavy sacrifices made by the revolutionaries, he wants to preserve their name in poetry.
