William Butler Yeats is one of the prominent British Poets of the twentieth century.An Irish poet, he was closely associated with the Irish Literary Revival and the Abbey theatre. But unlike many other Irish writers like Sean O’Casey, Yeats was not revolutionary in his attitudes. He was not quite persuaded to believe that all that bloodshed was wise and he did not think of patriotism as a very good or suitable subject of poetry. On 24th of April, 1916 an Easter Sunday the Irish revolutionary leaders occupies the General Post Office in Dublin and proclaimed Ireland a free republic. However their forces were defeated by the British army within a week. Sixteen of the leaders were court-martialed and shot dead . Although militarily, the uprising was insignificant, it captured the imagination of the Irish People.
The literal meaning of the poem is easy enough to grasp. The poem possesses a remarkable lyrical intensity. It has no metaphysical level and the poet is seen devoted to the expression of his vision of abstract reality .Even though Yeats had much in opposite with many of the actions of the revolutionaries, this uprising moved him deeply and this poem is a sincere ambiguous tribute to the leaders of the movement. The poem begins with a note of self-criticism for Yeats had been guilty of complacent detachment from his fellow Irishmen. But now he recognizes that through the events of Easter week, his fellow countrymen have achieved admirable heroic intensity; they have achieved a permanence, he recognizes and confirms by including them in his song. He contrasts “the polite meaningless words’ which constituted the “Casual Comedy” of pre-revolutionary Ireland. The Ireland had been mortally warned with the tragic “terrible beauty” that was born of the Easter rising.
Yeats goes onto catalogue the men and women whom he had previously undervalued; Constance Markiewing acknowledged to be the loveliest girl in country Sligo and an expert rider and hunter, whose voice had grown shrill in political argument: Padriac, the poet and founder of St. Edna’s school who was shot by the British; ThomasMacdonagh, a poet and critic who shared Pearse’s fate; and John Macbride who had hurt Yeats by marrying Maud Gonne, the great love of his life. Yeats bitterly refers to him as a drunken vainglorious lout; but all of them even Macbride have been changed utterly and have become part of the terrible beauty of Ireland after uprising.
However after paying tributes to these leaders, Yeats, the poet of mixed emotions, goes on to ruminate on the nature of revolutionary heroism. These people were obsessed with one purpose alone – the liberation of Ireland. This obsession made them unchanging objects in a world of change and flux. Rock like in this unchanging determination, they also become stone like impeding the flow of life. Yeats brings in images of change-horses splashing in water, moor hens calling to moor cocks, the clouds that cast shadows on the stream but the stone in the middle of the stream remains unchanging. The revolutionaries although heroic are also like the unfeeling hard stones in the river of life. A prolonged sacrifice can harden the heart. At what stage can we say that the sacrifice already made will suffice. Yeats opines that it is not for the human beings to decide this but for the God. All we can do is mutter the names of those who have sacrificed hemselves just as a mother utters a child’s name when the child is lulled to sleep.
But then Yeats realizes that these people are not asleep but dead and he wonders if he sacrifices of the martyrs are necessary. It was possible that England might keep her romise and give freedom to Ireland but for the Irish, it was enough to know that they
dreamed of the liberation of their country and died because of their dreams. Yeats
celebrates in his poetry, the heroic intensity that Macdonagh and MacBride and Conneley
and Pierse had achieved. The poem is an ambivalent celebration of the heroism of Easter, 916. The doubts and misgivings in the poem are characteristically Yeatism. e is, in a
sense, the poet of mixed feelings. It is this uncertainty that gives the poem its intension and
complexity and makes it one of the finest of all political poems.
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