Easter 1916

Easter 1916 - W. B. YEATS summary : short 📝 - Easter, 1916 is a poem by W. B. Yeats describing the poet's torn emotions regarding the events of the Easter Rising staged in Ireland against British rule on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916. The uprising was unsuccessful, and most of the Irish republican leaders involved were executed for treason. The speaker begins by describing how he used to encounter "them," the men and women he will later identify as the Irish rebels who died during the Easter Rising, at the end of the day. Their faces might reveal some internal agitation or strong emotion, but the speaker first saw them only in the context of ordinary, everyday life, coming home in the evenings from jobs in shops or offices, meeting the speaker on the streets of Dublin outside the grey stone eighteenth-century buildings. The speaker would briefly acknowledge them with a nod and meaningless small talk just to be polite, or stop a short while and make meaningless small talk just to be polite. Even while he was talking to them, he would already be thinking of some way to make fun of them while talking to one of his own friends later at their posh club. The speaker had nothing more serious on his mind than a joke because he thought that they all were just living regular, unimportant lives. Now, though, everything is completely, totally different. Some event has occurred that was highly destructive but also helped bring about profound change. The speaker then describes individual men and women who participated in the Rising. One woman tried earnestly but misguidedly to accomplish positive change. Her devotion to extreme political positions was reflected in her endless, strident arguing for her side. She used to show a more moderate, engaging personality when she was a young, beautiful woman who spent her time in leisurely pursuits like hunting. One man was a schoolteacher and poet, metaphorically riding the "winged horse" (a symbol of poetic inspiration in Greek mythology); another man was a poet and critic who was helping the first man develop his talent and cultivating his own.