William Butler Yeats - Easter,1916 - The Poetry That Inspired Things Fall Apart - a podcast by Christy and Garry Shriver

William Butler Yeats - Easter,1916 - The Poetry That Inspired Things Fall Apart

 

Hi, I’m Christy Shriver, and we’re here to discuss books that have changed the world and have changed us. 

 

And I’m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love Lit Podcast.  We have just wrapped up our four part series on Chinua Achebe and his groundbreaking book Things Fall Apart.   Generally, between books, we take a moment to look at a poem or a shorter piece that in some way connects to the longer piece we have been discussing. This week and next week, we want to discuss W. B Yeats, the Irish poet who wrote the poem “The Second Coming” from which Achebe took the title of his book.  Christy, what can you tell us about this poet, beyond the fact that he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1923?  Should we really like him?  Bottom line- is he boring for those of us who aren’t poetry heads?   

 

HA!! Well, as you know- I’m always trying to pitch the idea that poetry is for everyone- you don’t have to be a melodramatic person all caught up in their feels to find value in poetry.  It’s a tough sell, and every year when I get new kids in class- I have the arduous task of making this case.  In fact, school starts for me tomorrow- if you’re listening to this in real time, we are recording this in the fall of 2021 and school is starting back for us this week- and even though I am teaching all American Literature this year- this year- from AP all the way to regular English and all the levels in Between- I’m starting with the Irish poet William Butler Yeats- and actually this poem that we’re talking about today.  The reason I’m doing it- for one thing- Yeats is on my mind- but the bigger reason is because this poem is an occasional poem- an occasional poem is where you are moved by an occasion and this occasion provokes feelings that need to be recorded.  My students are coming back to school after being locked in their homes- some of them have not been out in a year and a house.  The first thing we are going to do is write an occasional poem, and we’re going to model it after Yeats.  If you’re a teacher and interested in this assignment, it’s on our website, but otherwise, my point is- Yeats was a guy who knew how to say things that we feel and here he conveys strong emotions about the identy politics of his day- something we all know a little bit about these days.  But Yeats has become popular because he knows how to express things people understand and identify with. The Coen brothers were inspired by him in their movie “No Country for Old Men” .  He’s shows up in episodes of Cheer’s, the band the Smith’s have alluded to him and even Joe Biden in a foreign policy speech has alluded to the very poem we’re talking about today.  But to answer your question, yeah, if we should like him- that’s always difficult to say.   Honestly, he’s from an era that’s long gone and from a part of the world, that’s different than for many of his readers.  He’s also  little difficult to dissect because he loves symbols. 

 

Those were a lot of disclaimers there.   

 

BUT, if you do get into him, there are a lot of people that actually enjoy his work- not just poetry heads.  You’ll  see him on a lot of those brainy quotes. 

 

I guess that’s true.  I actually just saw a meme on LinkedIn that quoted him. 

 

 

So, because Yeats has such a large body of work and is so complicated, we’re going to spend this week talking about him and the poem “Easter, 1916” then next week we’ll move to the poem Achebe uses for his book title, “The Second Coming”.  It’s harder to understand than the one we’re doing today.  It’s slightly apocalyptic and so complex, but don’t think it doesn’t have intrigue- Yeats had a complicated romantic life in general that we’ll talk about some today, but ultimately it resulted in a strange but successful marriage with a woman, named George,  who besides having the interesting ability to dictate messages from the other side, as in ghosts and stuff- was 18 when they met, btw-he was 46.  So there you go…stay tune… 

 

Ha- okay!  I can see how that age gap might turn some heads, especially at the turn of the 20th century.  So, can we expect symbols and philosophy? 

 

That’s some of it.  But also, his body of work is so large; it’s complicated; it has a lot of variety.  He started out talking about all the myths and beauty of his home country.  But he didn’t stay there.  His work is romantic; it’s political; it’s spiritual- he didn’t just write poems either, he wrote plays- but in all things the one thing that is true in all of it is that - his work is Irish- there is so much magic and mystery embedded in this history and culture of Ireland- those of us who don’t share the heritage of leprechauns, fairies, and magic are at a disadvantage by never having visited the amazing end of the rainbow we call Ireland. 

 

I know that’s a sore subject with you.  To get personal for a minute, Christy and I have gone with students on EF or Education First on several trips to Europe over the last few years.  In 2020, we had a trip planned with students from here in the Memphis area to tour Ireland and Scotland.  We were finally going to go but, of course, Covid struck the world, and that got cancelled.  Ireland is still on the bucket list, hopefully we’ll get lucky soon to be able to discover for ourselves the beauty and the mystery of the place- but until then, we will live vicariously through Yeats, U2 and most recently- The Derry Girls- Yes, I’m not ashamed to admit we watch and love that show.   

 

 It is a fun show- and really contextualizes in some very funny ways this ethnic challenges Ireland faces.  Poor James Maguire, one of the characters on the show is English- born- but has to attend an all girls school for his safety- due to his accent.  Their making fun, but we all know, of course, that racial tensions and identity politics can get ugly in a hurry.  Anyway, getting to Achebe, and Yeats, it’s really not surprising to me that Yeats caught Achebe’s attention.  And in many ways has a lot in common with Chinua Achebe. 

 

Well, they are from two very different places in the world, how do you mean? 

 

Well, first of all, and this is a big one- both men were men between two cultures- and this is something those of us outside of Great Britain or even Europe don’t always have in the forefront of our minds.  The Irish and the English are NOT the same people group.  The Irish are descended from the Celts; The English are Anglo-Saxon.  The Irish, like the Igbo, had a different language for centuries and in Yeats day when he visited the country side- it was the heart language of many of the country people.  The Irish are Catholic; the English are Protestant.  But the Irish are also animistic in many ways, especially the country people, and it was this culture that enchanted Yeats as a child, as did the animism of the Igbo for Achebe. Of course, the largest similarity between these two men are their lived experiences with colonialism.  Yeats lived through the Irish Independence, as did Achebe through the Nigerian one.  Both experienced the violence of transition and post-colonialism.   

 

Again something a lot of the world forgets about.  We think of colonialism in terms of Africa, Asia and the Americas, but the English efforts to colonize Ireland date to the 1500s, so we are talking about a long term antagonism and complicated history. 

 

And William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin,  Ireland in 1865 in an English protestant household to a promising middle class lawyer.  So, you can already see the set up for a front row to political conflict. 

 

1865, for Americans means the Civil War, but for those in Ireland, there was another horrific crisis.  Just like the stable crop in Nigeria is the yam; the staple crop of Ireland was the potato, and in 1845 a strain of white mold hit the potato crop and a great famine broke out.  Literally millions died of starvation and millions of others were forced to take their chances crossing the ocean and fleeing to America.  Besides just the natural catastrophe of the agricultural disaster, an even worse problem was the British government’s reaction to it.  There was a lot of prejudice in England towards the Irish, which we talked a little bit about when we talked about Frankenstein and Mary Shelley, but basically the government basically did too little to feed a starving population.  In fact, a lot of absentee English landowners- and who those guys were were basically were the hedge-fund owners of their day, those guys went so far as to still export Irish food supplies and evict poor tenant farmers who couldn’t pay their rents.  So, beyond being a natural disaster, the natural disaster brought out the worst in many people and so as these things often do- natural crisis turned political.  Many more Irish, even Protestant ones, who otherwise may not have been political people, began to see the importance of Self Rule in Ireland- Many who called Ireland home whether they were ethnically Irish or ethnically English began to strongly support political changes that would be costly. 

 

And that of course is Yeat’s family’s case- except with a twist.  Yeat’s father, decided when Yeat’s was two that he was going to leave Dublin and move to London to attend art school.  

 

 

At first pass feels slightly irresponsible.  

 

I think his wife thought so.  William’s mother, whose family was rich and from the countryside- was not a fan of urban London bohemian poor person life. In fact, she couldn’t deal with it and broke down emotionally.  Her depression got to the point that she became bedridden and basically droped out of the picture until her untimely death.  So, we have children, who, like many of us, are dropped into multiple cultures and are displaced.  We have little William, his brother Jack, and two sisters who are basically living in household where their parents hated each other.  They also, for the most part, lived in poverty, but they had this wealthy side of the family who lived well but far away in Ireland, in a town called Sligo.  During the school year, Yeats lived this impoverished life in a London slum where he was the Irish poor kid, but in the summer he would go to his grandparents fancy house in Sligo, this nice town on the coast.  However, Sligo is a Catholic area, so even though he can identify with the people in this community because he’s from the same countyr, he’s not from the same ethnic or religious group.   He’s the Protestant outsider kid from London. 

 

Except he’s not even really protestant either is he.   

 

  No, he really isn’t- and I guess that’s the Bohemian art side of this father. 

 

  His father did not believe in Christianity, which as we know, in that time period was a majority view. 

 

And I guess that’s what made the folklore and animism of the Irish culture so attractive to little William.  In Sligo, he learned about Irish folklore- which is something I don’t know a whole lot about, except that it’s magical- literally.  And we know he loved all this because he wrote about later in life.  He talked about people he knew growing up that taught him about magic and ghosts and would swear they had seen fairies.  He gathered these stories in his head and used them as inspiration for his early writing career. 

 

Well, like we talked about last week, lots of people all around the world are animistic, so is it possible that the cultural tradition of the people in Ireland, also in some ways connects to several beliefs of the Igbo.   

 

I think that’s likely fair to say.  Irish mythology certainly has a pantheon of gods, and ancestors also play a role in all of that.  Yeats was definitely an animist as we’ll talk about next week with a serious piece “The Second coming”, but his career started here with these fanciful stories.  One famous poem called, “The Stolen Child” is based on this idea that sometimes fairies steal human children, and it seems thatYeats likely really did believe in fairies.  He kind of reminds me a little bit of William Blake, in fact, a lot of Yeat’s stuff reminds me of William Blake, especially the spiritual stuff.   

 

And I want to be careful here not to get into the weeds here, but one time someone asked him if he really did believe in fairies, to which he responded something to this gist of- well, none of us really know what we do and don’t believe until we’re put to the test- and in fact, our behaviors say more about what we believe than what we tell people whether we realize it or not- which is kind of an interesting response.   

 

I guess he’s wanting to say, all of us believe in things we won’t own?  We claim to not believe in ghosts until we step into a haunted house and then no matter what we say, we run out like crazy people away from them.   

 

I think it’s something like that.   W. H. Auden when he wrote a poem eulogizing Yeats referenced this part of him as his silliness- but says it this way, “you were silly like us” and though it’s strange to believe in fairies- and maybe silly- Yeats is kind of honest about his strangeness or silliness.  

 

 

And is that what people like about him?  Do you think Part of the reason he could feel the strangeness of things so deeply has to do with this multi-cultural upbringing?  Being, to use Achebe’s words living at a crossroads of cultures. 

 

I do, just like Achebe.  And he definitely feels for the birth of his nation-- and that’s the poem we’re going to talk about today, “Easter, 1916” but before we go there, there’s another part of him that has fascinated the world- another strangeness.  Yeats had a strange fascination with this woman named Maud Gonne.   

 

Who is she? 

 

I would say, Maud Gonne is what Brittney Spears might call a Femme Fatale.  

 

Oh dear, Brittney Spears makes an Irish appearance! 

 

 

 I think Yeats would have like Britney, actually.  But anyway, the story goes that Yeats writes a poetry book.  It gets published and actually becomes pretty popular.  One person who noticed it was a woman named, Maud Gonne.  She was independently wealthy- very rich in fact, young, beautiful, well educated and an extremely aggressive Pro-Ireland political activitist and actress.  Like Yeats, she was from Ireland, but Anglo-Irish- so not ethnically Irish, but from Ireland.  I know that gets confusing.  After Yeat’s book came out, she went to see him in London, and he immediately fell in love with her.  They hung out for the 9 days she was there in London- and apparently that was enough to inspire a 45 year infatuation.  He was going to be in love with her for most of his life.  He proposed to her more times than I can find out- exactly-  I’ve heard numbers like 18 times- she rejected him every single time.  He wrote love poem after love poem for her. He wrotes plays for her to act in.   

 

Sounds a little bit like Petrarch and Laura- he seemed to enjoy unrequited love- the impossible woman. 

 

 Yeah- except it gets weirder.  Yeats, was absolutely convinced Maud was this virginal innocent rose.  Even after birthing two children with a married French journalist, sadly one child died.  The other, however, did not, Iseult.  Anyway, Yeats- in the face of insurmountable evidence- believed Maud was virginal until finally she told him the truth years later that the child was actually hers. 

 

How did that go over? 

 

 Well, at first he quit writing poetry about her, but then he did what most men would do who can’t get over their femme fatale even after 45 years. 

 

Oh, and what is that? 

 

He waited until the Iseult turned 22, and then tried to talk her into marrying him. 

 

By her, do you mean the daughter?  Or did he try to get the daughter to talk her mother to marry him.   

 

Oh no, you were right the first time.  He proposed to the daughter- and she seriously considered it.   

 

Well, there you are.  I’m assuming she looked like her mother. 

 

You assume correctly. She looked uncanningly like her mother did at that age.   

 

Nice.  So, are we to assume it’s a physical obsession that lasted all those years? 

 

Part of it, I guess.  I’m sure, it would be a fascinating psychological study, if people do stuff like that.  He definitely was enamoured with Maud Gonne’s beauty, but they also connected spiritually.  They both shared a lot of these animistic beliefs, not fairies, but connecting with the other world and things like that.  But, one other thing that really attracted him to her was her politics.  She was a extremely vocal spokesperson for the Irish homeland- something Yeats believed in too.  He wasn’t as big of an advocate as she was because she was for violence and he was against that, but she had real conviction.  She gave speeches, organized protests, did a lot of the things we seen political activitists do today- all of this was to overthrow British rule.  

 

Well, let me add that in the late 1890s, this would have been very progressive.  Gender stereotypes were deeply entrenched during this time period, especially in Ireland.  It’s unusual for a man of this period to find this kind of independence so irresistibly attractive.   

 

I agree, but Yeats is one of those men that is attracted to strong women- Maud Gonne and her daughter weren’t the only ones.  He had a very deep and personal relationship  with another woman named Olivia Shakespear, who actually was in love with him and whom he blew off. He also was besties with another powerful Irish nationalist woman named Lady Augusta Gregory. She actually worked with him on an important project to help create an Irish theater, and even supported him financially.   

 

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up besides the fact that it’s just kind of interesting, is that the poem Easter, 1916 is a political poem, but it’s deeply personal as well.  Yeats did that sort of thing a lot- he would take a world event and make it personal.  The poem “Easter, 1916” is considered the most powerful political poem every written in the English language- of course that’s always arguable.  But it is powerful.  But it also connects personally.      

 

In 1903 Maud Gonne- the ultimate unattainable woman- actually marries someone else- ending for a time Yeat’s continual marriage proposals.  She marries an Irish revolutionary named Major John MacBride.   

 

And not long after this, political chaos is breaking out all over the world. Tell us about it, Garry. 

 

 Well, just in terms of Ireland, after the potato famine- which I cannot overemphasize how serious that is, we have what has been called The Land Wars.  To oversimply, in the 1800s rural tenant farmers were starving, they couldn’t pay their rents, they got evicted by rich often absentee landlords, and then violence erupts.  By this time, concessions were being made and many tenants were buying their own property.  The Irish were making progress towards a better life, but it’s a mess.  Many were still leaving for America; many were still convinced they needed their own country.  The country is totally divided.  In 1914, Britain finally approves Home Rule, which means that Ireland won’t be independent, but will rule itself.  This seems great, except World War 1 breaks out and home rule doesn’t get implemented.   

 

And Yeats is not really on team Radical- like Maud Gonne is.  Maud Gonne wants complete independence and an Irish state.  Yeats is for Ireland, but he believes England will keep faith; Home Rule will be a reality and no one else really needs to die over this.  His, like many Irish people, was a middle of the road, ready for compromise kind of attitude.  He wants reconciliation between the people groups, which makes sense if you think about his upbringing.   

 

But here’s the complication with World War 1- what are the Irish supposed to do?  They want to rule themselves, they’ve been promised they are going to be given this opportunity with Home Rule, but now they’ve been told, we’ll we get around to doing that later.  We have a bigger problem and we can’t deal with this right now.  Oh and by the way, we need you to send your young men to fight.  The Irish are in an  existential double-bind.  Now they find themselves having to decide do that fight FOR the British against the Germans or do they run the risk of Germany winning?   Many Irish chose to fight with the British.  Now think about what does this mean?  Christy, you have strong feelings about World War 1- what do you think? 

 

I really do- I hate WW1- it was just the worst.  It means trenches, poisonous gas, trench foot, it means awful political propaganda.  It means little children as young as 14 lying about the age and people knowing they were lying about their age and dying in those awful trenches for reasons they couldn’t even tell you.  It means everything awful. 

 

Ha!  True- tell us how you really feel. 

 

Well, it’s so sad.  Anyway, I guess for the Irish, it means, if they fight for the British, they earn the right for some sort of independence.  Yeats believed, and I use his words, the British may still “keep faith.”   

 

Well, that brings us to the year 1916.  The year has been going on for a while now.  In Ireland there were basically two political parties- one for fighting for the British, another against.  There was an Irish Militia= the Volunteers- of this group- there were the National Volunteers and then the Irish Volunteers.  You can probably guess which one was for supporting the war and which one was more interested in creating a free state of Ireland.   

 

I’m going to say the Irish Volunteers. 

 

Yep, and I hope this isn’t hard to follow- but here’s what happened- we have two groups of people.  During the week of Easter 1916, we have many of the Irish Volunteers making the decision that they were going to take the opportunity that the British were distracted by the war and declare independence.  They picked Easter because of the idea of Jesus Rising again, the Irish rising again, so around 1600 go downtown, stage a rebellion, take over a bunch of buildings most prominently the Post Office and declare that Ireland is now a Republic.  The British, of course, respond by bringing in troops.  It gets violent, 485 are killed- half of those civilians.  1800 are taken to prison in Britain.  It’s a big riot. For the most part, most Irish people don’t support this movement.  However, the British make a terrible political mistake.  They choose to execute 16 of the leaders of the rebellion.  This caught everyone by surprise and outraged the people of Ireland. 

 

Yeats was in the group.  It wasn’t that he thought what the rebels did was right, but he understood their frustration, and the English owed them some sympathy.  

 

Exactly, and the irony is not lost on anyone that during this same week over in Hulluch, where they were fighting the Germans, the Germans had just released an extremely deadly poisonous gas attach on an Irish division of Volunteers and 442 had died just from the gas poisoning on the first day of the attack alone. 

 

And here’s the personal connection, one of the men executed by the British for being a leader in the rebellion was Maud Gonne’s husband, McBride. 

 

Yeats is very moved by everything.  He’s moved by the rebellion and he’s devastasted by the response of the British in executing the rebel leaders. He says this in a letter to Lady Gregory, “I had no idea that any public even could so deeply move me,” He was not even in Ireland at the time.  He further told her later, “I am very despondent about the future.  At the moment, I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all the freeing of Irish literature and criticism of politics.”  In the poem, which we’re getting ready to read, he talks about four of the rebels specifically.  A couple of them he liked.  He hated McBride, not just because Maude Gonne had married him, but because he physically beat her and her daughter and since they were Catholic she couldn’t divorce him.  McBride was a horrible person, but he knew him.  Dublin was a small town, and everyone knew everyone involved.  When Yeat’s writes at the end of the poem that  all has changed- changed utterly.  He means exactly that.  There is no going back to the way we were thinking before.   

 

 

 

Yes- the Irish war for independence starts in 1919 and by December 6, 1921, there is a free Irish state.  

 

The poem was not published until 1920, so that’s halfway between the war years, I guess.  It helped unify the Irish into wanting independence- he was famous.  He also made what happened in Dublin personal to everyone.  What’s interesting about the poem is that it doesn’t necessarily make the people who were executed holy martyrs- he even wonders if it was worth their lives.  What it did was, kind of say, well, maybe they were too fanatical, maybe they should have done it, maybe they shouldn’t, but that’s in the past now.  Now, I’m going to wear Green- and we all know that’s the color representing Ireland, the Emerald Island. 

 

Let’s read the poem.  We’ll read it stanza by stanza, and then we’ll make some more comments at the end. 

 

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. 

 

 

First thing to notice is that it’s in the first person.  I- have met them.  These people- these were people I knew before the war.  For the most part, I didn’t even care a lot about these people, “I have passed with a nod of the head or polite meaningless words”.  He points out that he had even made fun of them, “thought before I had done of a mocking tale or a gibe…at the club”- maybe he had thought they were just the crazy radical people they sat around drinking laughing at the less educated types.  Notice that he throws in the word “motley”- that’s the outfit court jesters wore, the fools- they were clowns until- all changed, changed utterly- a terrible beauty is born. 

 

And it is that phrase, “terrible beauty that people love so much”.  It’s an oxymoron.  What happened was terrible- the rebellion was terrible- but they were doing it for something beautiful.  Their ideals were honest.  There death is giving life to something that is important to all of us- they were proven to be right. 

 

 but the actors in this comedy are going to transform into players in a tragedy as we move through the stanzas.  Let’s read the second one, 

 

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. 

 

So in this stanza, he describes four people.  Four people he knew.  I do want to point out that these four people are not the four most important people in the rebellion.  They aren’t the most significant rebels.  He picks them because they were personal friends.  “That woman”  

 

“That woman”- Constance  Markievicz- wasn’t executed, but she was from Sligo- where we went to play as a child in the summer.  She was his childhood friend.  She also was a really good human.  She was rich and born to privilege.  She actually was the first woman ever elected to parliament, and later the first woman in Europe to ever have a cabinet position.  So, she was important, but by the time she died she had given away her entire fortune and died in a ward, among the poor where she wanted to be”.  She was arrested, but was not executed during the uprising.   

 

Then we have  

• “This man”- Patrick Pearse- was executed.  He was a fellow poet and a huge ring leader.  Yeats says he rode that winged horse- that’s Pegasus the pure white horse with the wings .   

• “This other his helper and friend is a reference to” Thomas McDonagh- Pearse and McDonagh started a school together and were teachers in Dublin.  Yeats had been a guest lecturer for them many times.  He respected how they were building a generation of Irish thinkers.   



• “This other man”- John McBride- an abusive person – he was a drunken, vainglorius lout who had done most bitter wrong to some who are near my heart- but he still includes him here in his little list of actors. 

He calls what they were involved with a “casual comedy”.  But is it funny?  Of course not.  It got serious really quickly. 

 

Well, what I see, with the possible exception of McBride- these were good sincere people that were targeted by the British- not a bunch of thugs. 

 

I think so- and that takes us to the third stanza- it’s a little more philosophical and abstract.  

 

 

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. 

 

This stanza is harder to follow, Christy. 

 

True, one of the things that is so hard about Yeats, and we’re going to talk about this way more next week with the poem “The Second Coming” is that he holds symbols in such high regard.  He thinks of them as way more interesting than just one thing representing something else.  So, when we see something here, like we do in this poem that looks like it might be a symbol, we have to think of it more deeply because that’s how Yeats’s thinks of it. 

 

So, what is a symbol and how do we know if something IS a symbol or not? 

 

That’s a great question.  I tell students all the time, something might be a symbol for something else if it looks out of place.  If something that shouldn’t be so important is given more importance than it regularly deserves.  Here’s an example, if I’m an elegant model, and everything I wear is extremely expensive, in the latest fashion, all that stuff, and I show up to an event, and I wear this very tattered and old looking bracelet around my arm-  you know- that must be a symbol.  You wouldn’t be wearing it if it weren’t.  You ask about it, and you find out it belonged a relative who had passed away or something like that- and all of a sudden it makes sense.  Things like that. 

 

So, in this stanza, it starts out like we would expect- all the hearts of the people he’d been talking about have one purpose and then this purpose is connected to a stone- and not just connected he uses the word “enchanted to a stone”- what the heck does that mean/. Well, to you or me who aren’t Irish- it may mean nothing.  But if you’re Irish,  you likely know that one of the names of Ireland is the Island of the Stone of Destiny.  You may also know that in Irish folklore the Stone of Destiny was one of the four sacred talismans of the goddess Dana and all the kings of Ireland  were crowned upon this inauguration stone and their destiny was tied in with the magical powers of the stone.  And if you really know your folklore, as Yeats did and often referenced in a lot of other poetry, you may also know that this stone is enchanted but sometimes fatal.   

 

Okay- so if the stone is symbolizing Ireland, what does this stanza mean? 

 

Well, that’s the thing about ambiguous writing- you have to decide what you think, and people don’t agree.  What we know for sure, is we see this image of something that stays the same- a rock- if we take it to mean a symbol of Ireland, then he’s making a statement about his homeland.  It’s something that survives- but as things change like the living stream- it can be fatal too.  To be Irish is to have a heritage, for all of its beauty and magic, is not always safe- the stone troubled the living stream.   

 

But then again, this is just my interpretation.  Some people thing the stone represents the coldness and the stream represents Ireland, so don’t be afraid to read it and make your own ideas.  That’s what poetry is all about- words bringing emotions to the surface and meaning different things to different people. 

 

The last stanza is left cryptic in some ways because it writes out people’s names again very specifically, but there’s a lot of other images that can be difficult.  Let’s read it and finish out. 

 

 

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. 

 

So, here we see all of a sudden all these rhetorical questions.  He’s asking the obvious question of is something like this worth it?  Is it justified?  Are there things we shouldn’t do, even if the cause is noble? 

He literally askes, “Was it needless death after all?”  He asks the obvious political question- England may have kept her end of the deal.    

 

Did they love too much?   

 

Then he kind of ends by immortalizing these names.  Kind of like saying, well, it’s too late to know now.  We will never know because the sacrifice is made.  They will be immortalized. 

 

 Just so you know, Maude Gonne hated the poem.  The poem was first pubished just for friends- so she got an early copy.  She said this, “Easter 1916, No, I don’t like your poem.  It isn’t worthy of you and above all it isn’t worthy of the subject- though it reflects your present state of mind perhaps, it isn’t quite sincere enough for you who have studied philosophy and know something of history know quite that that sacrifice has never yet turned a heart to stone though it has immortalized many and through it alone mankind can rise to God.  You recognize this in the line which was the original inspiration of your poem, ‘a terrible beauty is born’ but you let your present mood mar and confuse it till even some of the verses become unintelligible to many”. She went on and on but then got to the part about her husband to which she said, “as for my husband he has entered eternity by the great door of sacrifice which Christ opened and has therefore atoned for all”.  You can tell she felt free to share her mind.  

 

Ha! Well, most of the world disagrees with her and has found it worthy. 

 

I do want to come around to just a couple more interesting quirks before we leave it.  If you were to gray out all the words and just look at the form- Yeats deliberately wrote the poem to look like a column but a broken one- it’s skinny, the lines are short and fractured.  If you were to put this poem next to a picture of the shelled building on Sackville Street where the riot occurred, it would like kind of similar.  The poem is to be the monument that outlives the photograph of the scene the most of us will never see. 

 

And he did that on purpose. 

 

Yep- that’s why Poets write in verse- they can do stuff like that which you can’t do in a story. 

 

Also, another point to notice- he signs and dates the poem, but the date is weird.  It’s not the date of the Rising, instead it’s September 25, 1916 presumably the date he finished writing it. But the date of the uprising is encoded in the lines.  There are four stanzas- the fourth month- April- the first and and third stanza have 16 line (the year) the second and forth have 24 – the dates.  It’s a strange way to date a poem, but the date of the event is embedded the the structure.  Then we have the  date at the end.  

 And so we have to ask, Garry, what happened on that date? 

 

Well, I’m assuming you are meaning WW1- that date overlaps with the horrific Battle of the Somme. In that battle alone, the British lost almost 500,000 young lives many of them Irish.   I guess it’s a final irony.  Why did Yeats included the date when he usually didn’t date his poems? 

 

Maybe as a way of reminding his readers, and here we are. It’s not over yet.  A terrible beauty has been born- I have written a monument for those who dreamed of a new Ireland- but this new Ireland will have to negotiate a new modern world order- it will not be a casual comedy- and no matter where you fall on the spectrum of identity politics- we will all remember and wear Green. 

 

And of course- all of this during Holy Week of Easter, 1916- nothing could be more ironic.  Thanks for listening.  I hope you enjoyed learning. Little of the history of Ireland as it is personalized for us by the great William Butler Yeats.  This episode we looked at his most famous political poem, next week we will look at the poem that inspired the title for “Things fall Apart”.  We look forward to it and hope you do too. 

 

As always, text this episode to a friend, spread the word about the podcast on your own social media, and help us grow. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

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