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
The poem begins with life in “grey” Dublin before the Easter Rising. The speaker is casually acquainted with some of the people who will go on to be involved in it. The description here shows that he does not take them seriously at first. He might exchange polite words with them in the street, but makes fun of them behind their backs.
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
The end of the first stanza foreshadows that the speaker’s relationship with the Irish Republicans he passes in the street will change. Just as Dublin is transformed by the Easter Rising, so too are its participants. Before, it is as if everyone is laughable. They are like court jesters dressed in multi-colored “motley.” However, with their transformation into martyrs, something beautiful and frightening comes into the world.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
Describing Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz (a countess, suffragette, and Irish nationalist) the speaker says that she had a sweet voice before revolutionary politics made her harsh and “shrill.” When she was young, she used to engage in elite pursuits like horse-riding and hunting.
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.
Thomas MacDonagh was also a participant in the Easter Rising. He had great potential and could have gone on to do influential things once he came “into his force.” However, this potential was cut off after he was executed by the British army.
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
These lines show how the Easter Rising transformed its participants beyond whatever individual faults they had. The person referred to here is John MacBridge. He was a major in the Irish Republican Army. He was also the drunk and abusive ex-husband of Maud Gonne, Yeats’s friend and the love of his life. That he “has resigned his part/In the casual comedy” can mean that he has given up the court jester-like ridiculousness of his earlier life. It may also mean that history itself is like a “casual comedy.” He took his place in the events of the Easter Rising the way an actor would play a role. The result is that he was “transformed utterly.”
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The third stanza compares the stone, which remains still and seeming unchanging, to the cyclical and constantly moving natural world. The stone is a symbol of the heart of the revolutionary. It is committed to “one purpose” or cause. This makes it unnaturally consistent in a way that seems to go against nature: it “trouble[s] the living stream.”
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
These lines show the speaker’s ambivalent relationship to the Easter Rising. The frequent questions and repetitions show that his mind is not made up. First he asks when all the violence and self-sacrifice will finally add up to create a real change. Then he says that this is not up to humans but will be decided by “Heaven,” or God. He says that the role of moral people, “out part,” is to repeat the names of the dead the same way a mother would “murmur” the name of her child falling asleep after a long day of “run[ning] wild.” Then the poet draws on the old motif of death as a form of sleep: “What is it but nightfall?” However, his indecisiveness is again clear in the next line when he rejects this kind of poetic idealization: “No, no, not night but death.” The events are too gruesome to be smoothed away by pleasant metaphors.
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
In the climax of the poem, the speaker finally names the Irish revolutionaries that he had only alluded to previously. He then says that now and in the future, whenever Irish people gather together (Ireland is symbolized by the color green) people will remember how these four revolutionaries were transformed through the events of the Easter Rising.
