100 years later, Yeats’s Easter 1916 still stirs debate about its meaning

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William Butler Yeats was staying with an artist friend in England in April, 1916, when he learned that insurgents in Dublin had staged an uprising against British rule. The news "broke on his head like a thunderstorm," writes his biographer, Roy Foster.

Soon, he began composing a poem. Easter 1916 is the best-known literary work to come out of Ireland's Easter Rising, which has its 100th anniversary on April 24. Its echoing line "A terrible beauty is born" is one of the most famous in modern poetry. Irish schoolchildren still recite its closing lines:

I write it out in 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

The poem is often read as a tribute to the rebels, even an endorsement of their cause. It is much more complicated than that. What makes Easter 1916 a lasting work of art instead of mere patriotic doggerel is Yeats's ambivalence about this shocking act of political violence. As Foster writes in a recent issue of History Ireland, the poem "derives its power from a sense of agonized uncertainty that pulses through the stanzas."

That uncertainty lingers. As Ireland celebrates the centenary, scholars and politicians are still debating the legacy of the Rising. Though it marked the beginning of the final drive for Irish independence, it also launched years of insurgency, counter-insurgency and civil war that left the island divided. No less than a former prime minister, John Bruton, wrote last month that "the path of violence" embarked on in 1916 "was traversed at a terrible price."

When people read Yeats's poem, says historian Fearghal McGarry, of Queen's University Belfast, "they tend to focus more on the 'beauty' than the 'terrible' and it becomes a kind of euphemism." In fact, he says, the poem poses critical questions: "Was the Rising necessary? Were these men political zealots? Were they obsessed with politics over humanity?"

Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865. His father was a lawyer who became a portrait painter; his mother was the daughter of a well-off merchant. The family moved to London when Yeats was 2, but he spent holidays with his grandparents in the west of Ireland.

Yeats had shifting feelings about Irish nationalism. As a young writer, he was caught up in the Irish literary revival of the late 19th century. He collected folk tales from Ireland's misty past. He wrote poems that drew on Celtic mythology. He helped found what was to become the Abbey, an Irish national theatre intended "to bring upon the stage the deeper emotions of Ireland."

The play he wrote along with his friend Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan, glorified the Irish rebellion of 1798 and inspired nationalists who sought to free Ireland from British domination. It had such a powerful effect that that, late in life, Yeats wondered whether he had sown the seeds for the bloodletting of the Easter Rising:

Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?

But by 1916, Yeats, then 50, was convinced that the heroic era of Irish nationalism was over. His politics were moderate. He leaned toward those who sought Home Rule for Ireland – self-government within the British Empire. In his poem September 1913, he writes:

Romantic Ireland's dead and

gone,It's with O'Leary in the grave.

John O'Leary, a veteran of the Fenians, the nationalist secret society, had been an early mentor to Yeats. O'Leary died in 1907.

The events of Easter 1916 upended all Yeats's assumptions. On April 24, Easter Monday, Republican rebels seized key buildings around Dublin. Their leader, Patrick Pearse, stood outside the General Post Office to proclaim Ireland's independence. "In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood."

The Rising was doomed from the start. An attempt to smuggle in German arms had failed. Conflicting orders from Republican leaders meant that only a fraction of their forces took to the streets. At first, a surprised public scorned the rebels as toy soldiers who had unleashed chaos on Dublin at the very time that countless Irishmen were away fighting real battles in the trenches of the First World War. By the end of the week, a reinforced British army had bombed and burned the rebels into surrender.

Public opinion began to turn when the British began executing the rebel leaders one by one. Martyred, they took on the mantle of heroes to a long-suffering nation. Moderate nationalists such as Yeats soon recognized that the rebellion, though a military failure, had altered the course of Irish history. He wrote at the time that he had seen "a world one has worked with or against for years suddenly overwhelmed. As yet one knows nothing of the future except that it must be very unlike the past."

Yeats returned to Dublin in May to find much of the central city in ruins. Easter 1916 took shape over the following summer. His personal life at the time was in turmoil. He had decided to propose marriage again to Maud Gonne, the renowned Irish actress and fierce patriot who had been the object of his unrequited love for many years and who had played the title role in Cathleen ni Houlihan. She had been widowed when the British executed her estranged husband, John MacBride, for his role in the rebellion. She refused Yeats again. Leaving her summer house in Normandy, Yeats finished the poem at Coole Park, Lady Gregory's Irish estate.

The poem begins as a kind of apology to the dead rebels. Many were poets and writers whom Yeats had known personally through cultural and nationalist circles. Before the Rising, the author had passed them "with a nod of the head/Or polite meaningless words." One (this was Pearse, the rebel leader) "had kept a school." Another (Constance Markievicz, the republican firebrand who was the most prominent woman in the Rising) spent "Her nights in argument/Until her voice grew shrill." Still another (Yeats's rival for the Irish actress Maud Gonne, John MacBride), he had once dismissed as "A drunken, vainglorious lout./He had done most bitter wrong/To some who are near my heart."

Now all of them were "Transformed utterly:/A terrible beauty is born." The novelist Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn, says that, because of that famous, repeated line the poem seems to lionize the rebels and make the Rising seem "iconic, almost noble." To the contrary, he wrote in the London Review of Books last month, "Yeats has much to question, and much to say about the idea of violence and violent insurrection and nationalism."

In the closing stanza, he seems to warn about the dangers of fanatical devotion to a cause.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

Or, earlier:

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter,

seemEnchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

Yeats even appears to suggest that the rebellion may have been a futile waste of lives, because Ireland could have achieved her freedom by other means. Britain, after all, had promised Home Rule for Ireland once the war was over.

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

Gonne understood that the poem came well short of wholehearted support for the rebels. When Yeats sent her a copy, she wrote: "No I don't like your poem, it isn't worthy of you and above all it isn't worthy of the subject." She said "sacrifice has never yet turned a heart to stone though it has immortalized many and through it alone mankind can rise to God."

Yeats himself seemed to have had qualms about how the poem would be received. He held off having it published, allowing only a handful of copies to be passed around and reading it to select groups. It was not until October, 1920, that it first appeared in England, in the New Statesman.

The poem soon became reduced to a sort of billboard for the Rising. In Transforming 1916, a book about how the rebellion was remembered on its 50th anniversary, Roisin Higgins says that the "poetic ambiguities" of Easter 1916 were all but forgotten and the poem was quoted "without much sense that 'a terrible beauty' was anything more than a rhetorical flourish."

Foster, the Yeats biographer and Oxford University scholar, writes: "The poem in which he interrogated the revolutionary act, and those who made it, became canonical." It made the slain rebels into plaster saints. That cannot have been Yeats's intention. Easter 1916 is a great poem not just because of that unforgettable echoing line or because of how his words paint pictures in the mind – "The rider, the birds that range/from cloud to tumbling cloud" – but because it reflects the complexity of the event and the writer's conflicting feelings about it.

It was Yeats who once said that "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." What makes Easter 1916 memorable is that we can see the poet quarrelling with himself about the episode that shook his country.

Yeats lived on for more than two decades after writing the poem. He bought and restored a ruined Norman castle in County Galway, the tower that became a recurring image in his work. In 1917, after proposing marriage to Maud Gonne's daughter Iseult and being rejected, he married a young Englishwoman, Georgie Hyde-Lees. They had a son and daughter together.

When Ireland won its independence, Yeats became a senator in the new Irish Free State. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He was productive into his last years, putting out collections of poetry as late as 1938 and 1939, the year of his death.

Easter 1916 is probably his most cited work, and certainly his most misunderstood.