Let us begin with the title of the poem, “Easter, 1916.” Why Easter, I asked myself, when that is the pagan holiday of rebirth. The Christian holiday is termed “Resurrection Sunday.” I believe it is because Yeats wanted to harken back to before England invaded Ireland, stealing so much of Ireland’s culture, including her faith system.
Yeats inserts himself into the poem and describes the hubbub of normal, daily Irish men and women in the city. Yeats having a great love for the country, as is made evident in his poem, “Lake at Innisfree,” and so I find the setting of the poem “Easter, 1916” interesting because of this fact. So, the setting itself is a metaphor in and of itself. The first adjective in the poem is “vivid.” Poets know how to use adjectives and adverbs sparingly, letting the nouns and verbs do the work. So why vivid? In my personal poet’s POV is that vivid represents the not-washed-out faces of the old, the ones that have lived long and hard. Vivid represents those younger folks working, and possibly the ones that will engage in change, dare to upset the status quo. The next adjectives are: “polite and meaningless.” These are metaphors for the usual chatter we hear on the street, more serious talk would be hidden away. The next adjective is motley. Not being sure what it meant in Yeats’s poem I look up the word in the dictionary, here is what I found: “mot·ley ˈmätlē/ adjective: motley; comparative adjective: motlier;
superlative adjective: motliest 1. incongruously varied in appearance or character; disparate. "a motley crew of discontents and zealots" synonyms: miscellaneous, disparate, diverse, assorted, varied, diversified, heterogeneous” (www.merriam webster.com/dictionary/motley, 2013) With this information in hand, I concluded that this adjective too meant more than just an adjective. Motley is expressive of the folks he interacts with, the ordinary, the lower class, to lower middle class, the workers, the backbone of any country. Now at the end of the stanza is where the adjective, “terrible” is married to beauty. What an oxymoron to use to describe the results of the change that is taking place. It is repeated and done so for emphasis. Times were growing dangerous, but as in Fanon’s book, “The Wretched of the Earth” says that only through violence can decolonization occur. The words terrible beauty also has hidden meaning. According to Dilworth:
…for William Butler Yeats, who was an aficionado of the esoteric, including numerology. In Yeats's poem, the number 4 corresponds to the four patriots named in the last stanza: "MacDonagh and MacBride/And Connolly and Pearse" (lines 75-76). They have achieved that condition of human sublimity which Yeats calls "terrible beauty," an oxymoron that is fourfold in alliterative chiasmus: the t at the start of "terrible" repeated in the t of "beauty," and the b near the end of "terrible" repeated as the first letter of "beauty. (Dilworth)
In addition to the above Dilworth also points out the following: Such correspondence may be accidental or negligible in importance even in Yeats's work, but there is one numerical correspondence that seems indisputably significant. The four stanzas and the 16 or 24 lines in each mark the opening date of the event celebrated by the poem. The number 16 corresponds to and is colloquially short for the year 1916. Too high to indicate a month, the number 24 indicates the day of the month, leaving the number 4 to designate the fourth month in the year, April. This date, April 24, 1916, was Easter Monday… (Dilworth) I heard a long time ago that the woman Yeats refers to in the opening lines of stanza two is about Constance Markiewicz. I did a bit of research on her, and found out that, “Her father, Sir Henry Gore-Booth, always attempted to act as a good landlord and provided free food for his tenants during the 1879-80 famine” (Spartacus Educational, 2013). She was part of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), she was also in Sinn Fein, as well as a Lieutenant in the Irish Citizen Army. She was once quoted as saying, "We are told the principal argument against our having votes is that we don't make noise enough. Of course it is an excellent thing to be able to make a good deal of noise, but not having done so seems hardly a good enough reason for refusing the franchise" (Spartacus Educational, 2013). I take Yeats’ lines on her, and now the metaphor is clear, 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?” Referring to the horse, she “was second in command at the St. Stephen's Green and College of Surgeons garrisons, was sentenced to death for her role in the Rising. Her sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life ‘on account of her sex’” (An Phoblacht, 2013).
Yeats refers to Pearse, MacDonagh, and MacBride in the second half of the second stanza. All of whom were executed for their part in the rising. The adjective “winged” horse is there because Pearse was a poet, and Pegasus represents the arts. As for, “A drunken, vainglorious lout” Yeats, it is understood, was in love with McBride’s wife, and McBride was known to have been abusive to her.
I will close with one last interesting piece, the “Wherever green is worn” refers to the wearing of a shamrock, when “Queen Victoria made wearing a shamrock, by members of her regiments, punishable by death by hanging. It was during this dark time that the phrase “the Wearing of the Green” began.” (The Story of the Shamrock and the Wearing of the Green)
Works Cited
An Phoblacht. (2013, 10 2). Retrieved from An Phoblacht: http://www.anphoblacht.com/contents/15099
The Story of the Shamrock and the Wearing of the Green. (2013, 10 2). Retrieved from The Digital celt: http://www.thedigitalcelt.com/the-story-of-the-shamrock-and-the-wearing-of-the-green/
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/motley. (2013, September 29). Retrieved from www.merriam-webster.com: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/motley Dilworth, T. (2009).
The Hidden Date in Yeats's EASTER 1916. The Explicator, 236. Spartacus Educational. (2013, 10 2). Markiewicz. Retrieved from Spartacus Educational: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wmarkiewicz.htm Yeats, W. B. (1989). Easter, 1916. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London, UK: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.