“Easter, 1916” describes the Easter Rising. This event took place when Irish Republicans seeking to break off from British rule staged an uprising in the heart of Dublin. After six days, hundreds of rebels were killed in the fighting. After they surrendered, the remaining rebels were shot by firing squad or executed by hanging. The poem begins by describing how the speaker had met many of these people previously. He saw them in the street among “grey/Eighteenth-century houses” as they were leaving their workplaces. They stopped in the street sometimes and engaged in small talk. Yet the speaker talked badly about these people behind their backs. He made fun of them while sitting at a club or restaurant to make his companions laugh. Yet with their deaths, the situation has transformed: “All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born.”
The second stanza describes some of the people who fought in the rebellion. The first mentioned is Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz, described here only as “that woman.” She was a suffragette and Irish nationalist who was involved in the rebellion, though she was not executed after being captured. The poem describes her “sweet” voice turning “shrill” from arguing, though she was also full of “ignorant good-will.” The person described as “this man” is educator and poet Patrick Pearse. His “daring” and “sweet” helper is Thomas MacDonagh. He was an activist, poet, and playwright. The fourth person mentioned here is John MacBridge, a major in the Irish Republican Army. MacBridge was married to Yeats’s old friend Maud Gonne, whom he abused. This is what is meant by the lines: “He had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart.” Yeats was famously in love with Gonne. Yet her ex-husband is included in the poem anyway for “He, too, has been changed in his turn.” Just as the Easter Rising transformed Dublin in the first stanza, the second stanza shows that it has transformed the people involved in it. They have given rise to a “beauty” that is “terrible.”
The third stanza shows the speaker’s ambivalence about the Easter Rising by using nature imagery. The natural state of the world is compared to a “living stream.” It ebbs and flows “through summer and winter.” Yet the heart of these revolutionaries stands still as if “enchanted to a stone.” There is something unnatural about the revolutionary’s heart. Unlike the “show of cloud” which “changes minute by minute,” the stone stands still. It does not live “minute by minute” like the “moor-hens” or the “horse.” It does not move at all.
In the last stanza, the speaker says that “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.” He suggests that sacrificing oneself for a cause like this is too much of a burden. He also says that “England may keep faith” with its promise to grant Home Rule to Ireland, which would mean that all the sacrifice and death of the Easter Rising was unnecessary. He suggests that an “excess of love” for their country and their ideals has “bewildered” these revolutionaries. Yet the poem ends with the confirmation that they are still worth being remembered. The speaker suggests that “our part [is]/To murmur name upon name” as a mother might say her child’s name while rocking it to sleep. Then the poem names four of the rebels: Patrick Pearse (poet, educator, and commander-in-chief of the Irish Republican Brotherhood), James Connolly (leader of the Irish Citizen Army Volunteers), Thomas MacDonagh (activist and writer), and John MacBride (major in the Irish Republican Army and ex-husband of Yeats’s friend Maud Gonne). The speaker says that “now and in time to be,” these four men will be remembered, “Wherever green is worn.” The poem then ends with the same refrain: “changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born.”
