Easter, 1916 Literary Elements

The speaker is unnamed but is closely associated with the poet William Butler Yeats himself. This is shown by the reference to John MacBridge as someone who “had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart.” The speaker has lived in Dublin and met the revolutionaries that the poem commemorates. He has ambivalent feelings about the Easter Rising, seeing it both giving rise to “beauty” and as something “terrible.”

The poem uses an ABAB rhyme scheme. The meter is described as an iambic trimeter or three-stress line, though it is not consistent. The number of syllables in each line varies between six and nine.

“Our wingèd horse” both refers to the mythical horse Pegasus and is a metaphor for the art of poetry.

Everyday life is compared to a “casual comedy” in the poem through a metaphor.

In the lines “Too long a sacrifice/Can make a stone of the heart,” the heart is a metaphor for human feelings and the stone is a metaphor for the numbing of these feelings through excessive sacrifice.

“What is it but nightfall?/No, no, not night but death.” In these lines, death is compared to nightfall and sleep, but then the speaker corrects himself and says that death is just death. It cannot be described with a metaphor.

A terrible beauty is born (alliteration and assonance of “b” sounds)

So sensitive his nature seemed (alliteration of “s” sounds)

No, no, not night but death (alliteration of “n” sounds)

To know they dreamed and are dead (alliteration of “d” sounds)

Transformed utterly: / A terrible beauty (alliteration and assonance of “t” sounds

Coming with vivid faces (assonance of “I” sounds)

A shadow of cloud on the stream (assonance of “o” and “a” sounds)

The long-legged moor-hens dive (assonance of “o” sounds)

The speaker’s relationship to the executed rebels contains situational irony. He describes meeting them in passing with “polite meaningless words.” He also admits to having mocked them while sitting around a fire at a club in order to make friends laugh. Yet the unexpected result of the Easter Rising is that they become transformed by the events into something larger. The poem ends by naming MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly, and Pearse directly and saying that they will be remembered “Now and in time to be.” In this way, the poem moves from everyday, trivial encounters to matters of deep historical importance.

Romanticism, political poetry, modernism

Dublin, Ireland before and after the Easter Rising of 1916 (April 24th-April 29th). The action takes places on the “grey” streets of the city and in a club. The third stanza describes an identified natural scene where horses, clouds, streams, and chickens exist.

Ambivalent, uncertain, mournful, elegiac

The protagonists are the speaker himself as well as Constance Gore-Booth Markievicz, MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly, and Pearse. The antagonist is the unpredictability of history and the permanence of death. These are described as the work of “Heaven” because they are inscrutable and move in ways that humans cannot predict. Even when they try to change history, history changes them and works in ways beyond their purposes.

The major conflict of the poem is the Easter Rising itself and the speaker's ambivalent feelings about the events. At the end of the fight between the Irish Republicans and the British Army, the rebels are executed. The poem asks whether their sacrifice was worth it and whether or not being committed to a cause makes one lose one’s better judgment and reason. The speaker argues that the result of this event is ambiguous. It gives rise to a “terrible beauty.”

The climax occurs in the fourth stanza when the speaker declares that he will now name the four Irish Republicans he described earlier:

I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse

The first stanza ends with the line “A terrible beauty is born,” which is repeated throughout the poem. This line foreshadows the events of the Easter Rising and the execution of its leaders.

These lines about John MacBridge describe the tragic events of the Easter Rising in an understated manner as a “casual comedy.”

He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy

The line "That is heaven's part" suggests that it is up to God to decide when enough sacrifice has been made that the Irish Republican cause will be successful. It is an allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the Ghost refers to Gertrude and says “leave her to heaven.”

The lines “For England may keep faith/For all that is done and said” allude to the Government of Ireland Act 1914, which declared that Ireland would be given Home Rule (self-government within the United Kingdom). With the outbreak of World War I, the British government deferred Irish Home Rule until the war was over.

"England" is used as a metonym for the English government.

“Coming with vivid faces/From counter or desk” uses synecdoche to refer to workplaces like shops (with their counters) and offices or schools (with their desks).

“All changed, changed utterly” is an example of hyperbole, as not everything can be changed by a single event.

“And a horse plashes within it” uses onomatopoeia in the word “plash” (meaning “splash”) to imitate the sound of a horse stepping in water.