How Easter 1916 is an anti-nationalist poem?

“Easter, 1916” praises the uprising but it does this in a complex and often ambiguous manner. In the repeated line “A terrible beauty is born,” for example, there is both praise and criticism. As Irish historian Fearghal McGarry writes, when people read this line "they tend to focus more on the 'beauty' than the 'terrible' and it becomes a kind of euphemism.” However, a “terrible beauty” is not just a great beauty but one that causes terror. For the speaker of Yeats’s poem, the Easter Rising is a complex event—neither completely good nor completely bad. As the poem explores the event and some of its primary actors, it does not resolve this ambiguity on one side or the other. Instead, it shows that the meaning of the event cannot be solved for certain. The only sure thing is that the world has been changed permanently and a new period has begun. For this reason, it is worth remembering the names of the people who fought in this conflict and who died for the dream of an independent Ireland.

The first stanza begins with a description of Dublin before the Easter Rising. The speaker says “I have met them,” referring to some of the nationalist fighters. They have “vivid faces” but they walk down “grey” streets and work in offices or shops. The speaker says, “I have passed [them] with a nod of the head/Or polite meaningless words.” He is not close friends with these people, but they stop and chat occasionally. However, behind their backs he often ridicules them. He thinks about how he has told “a mocking tale or a gibe/To please a companion/Around the fire at the club.” The attitude towards these people here is dismissive. He even compares the residents of Dublin to court jesters, as they all “lived where motley is worn.” The last two lines of this stanza then reveal a strong shift in tone: “All changed, changed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born.” Neither the city nor its people can be the same again after the events of the Easter Rising.