POETS Day! WB Yeats’ “Easter, 1916”
Welcome once again to POETS Day, that wonderous day where we do our best to usher in the weekend, Henry Ford’s greatest creation, a few hours ahead of schedule by embracing the ethos of the day: Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend. Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.
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“Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.”
– from “Swift’s Epitaph” by W.B. Yeats
Though a thorough Nationalist, it was not Yeats’ wish that Ireland should erupt in violence, but he knew a Rubicon when he saw one.
The Easter Rising of 1916 began around noon on Monday, April 24. Irish revolutionaries intended to strike in concert nationwide, but confusion and conflicting orders stymied most actions outside Dublin. Inside Dublin was a different story. By mid-afternoon, rebels held the city-center. In front of the occupied General Post Office they read the Proclamation of Irish Republic, copies of which were distributed and plastered about the city.
The British declared martial law and brought artillery and machine gun fire to bear on the more lightly armed uprising. Five days of skirmishing followed until the rebel leadership, having abandoned their headquarters at the post office to the British, surrendered on Saturday, April 29 from the terrace at 16 Moore Street, a poultry shop called Plunkets.
“In order to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens… hopelessly outnumbered… have agreed to an unconditional surrender… order their commands to lay down arms.”
On May 3 sixteen of the rebellion’s leadership, many known to Yeats, were shot for their crimes. The British intent was to set an example, show a firm hard, and quash the treasonous spirit among the Irish. Yeats, opposed to armed resistance but left holding only hope, realized that the executions would have the opposite effect. He finished “Easter, 1916” by the end of September of that year. He held it back until 1920, with the publishing of his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer.
Of those sentenced to die only Constance Markievicz, also known as Countess or Madame Markievicz, survived. Her sentence commuted because she was a woman. She was freed in 1917 under the general amnesty granted the Irish rebels by Britain. She went on to win election to the U.K. House of Commons, but as a member of Sinn Fein she followed her party’s lead and refused to participate in the governing body in protest. She was a childhood friend of Yeats but the poet mourned changes in her brought on by political zeal.
That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
After her death in 1927 Yeats wrote “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz” in memory of her and her sister, published in 1933. “The older is condemned to death, / Pardoned, drags out lonely years / Conspiring among the ignorant.”
Padraig Pearse was among the revolutionary leadership. It was Pearse who gave the order beginning what was meant to be a nationwide uprising that Easter Monday. It was Pearse who wrote the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and read it aloud in front of Dublin’s General Post Office, and it was Pearse who ordered the Nationalists to stand down that Saturday from the poultry shop.
He founded St. Edna’s, and Irish language secondary school outside of Dublin and was well regarded as a poet: “The man had kept a school / And rode our winged horse;”.
British authorities kept from the public at least two of Pearse’s unpublished poems dated May 1, during his time of captivity.
Yeats wrote about Thomas MacDonagh in the lines after he did about Pearse. MacDonagh was assistant headmaster at St. Edna’s, a poet, and a playwright.
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.
MacDonagh led the battalion that took Jacob’s Biscuit Factory.
Yeats didn’t care for John MacBride, divorced from his friend Maud Gonne in 1905. There were accusations that cast the man in terrible light, most notably that MacBride sexually abused his ten year old step daughter. That the courts found no evidence of his guilt in that matter doesn’t seem to have lessened the poet’s dislike.
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;
There’s a funny story about MacBride. Someone, on hearing of his impending marriage said something disapproving about a lout like MacBride marrying a wonderful woman like Gonne. By the time word of the insult got back to MacBride it was mangled by repetition. MacBride challenged the disparager to a duel and while they were inspecting pistols or whatever you do before a duel the insult came up, and it became clear that MacBride was told the man said he couldn’t believe a wonderful man like him was marrying an awful woman like Gonne and demanded the duel to protect his fiancé’s honor. When he found out that man thought he, not Gonne, was the lout he reportedly said “Shake hands, old man,” and recanted his challenge.
MacBride had no idea the uprising was imminent. He saw MacDonagh marching in uniform with his men the day of, asked if he could join, and because of his fame as commander of the Irish Transvaal Brigade fighting for the Boers against the British in the Second Anglo-Boer War was made second in command on route to Jacob’s.
Year’s later, Maud Gonne wrote to Yeats. “No I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you & above all it isn’t worthy of its subject… As for my husband he has entered eternity by the great door of sacrifice.”
A final man was named in “Easter, 1916” in the last stanza along with Pearse, MacDonagh, and MacBride: James Connolly, who commanded of small contingent in name but was commander of all rebellious forces in Dublin in practice. Upon surrender he’s said to have told his men “Don’t worry. Those of us that signed the proclamation will be shot. But the rest of you will be set free.”
W.H. Auden, the other “W” initial poet, wrote the essay “Yeats as an Example” for The Kenyon Review in 1944. In it, Auden writes that major poets write a lot of bad poetry because they are never satisfied. They keep trying to develop, find new ways to expression. He masters a form, even one he invents, and, plies his skills as a novice to another. Auden does something annoying that I’m discovering a great many poets do when wearing their critic hat and that is offer a snippet of a poem without informing the ignorant reader of the title or where the whole can be found. He quotes Yeats:
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out from old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let the take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.
Throughout Yeats’ changing tastes and experiments, there remains Yeats. The form can’t suppress his understanding. It will be a saddened, wizened, or amused understanding, but he sits above acknowledging that things unravel as they must. He’s an impassioned observer.
More from Auden: “[Yeats] transformed a certain kind of poem, the occasional poem, from being either an official performance of impersonal virtuosity or a trivial vers de societe into a serious reflective poem of at once personal and public interest.”
In the second stanza Yeats writes the phrase “casual comedy.” It reminds me of another Yeats line, “O saddest harp in all the world” from The Wanderings of Oisin. Our priorities, passions, subject to reorder in a moment.
Easter, 1916
(W.B. Yeats 1865-1939)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.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 man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
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.
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.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.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;
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.
