Yeats’s Easter, 1916 THE UNCERTAINTY OF ITS SETTING FORTH Exhibition curated by Joseph M Hassett based on his donation to UCD, given in honor of Prof Gus Martin, courtesy of the American Ireland Fund.
W. B. Yeats From Easter, 1916
W. B. Yeats portrait (courtesy of the National Library of Ireland)
Yeats’s Easter, 1916
I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses‌.. Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.
Yeats’s Easter, 1916 THE UNCERTAINTY OF ITS SETTING FORTH
The Exhibit’s copy of Easter, 1916 is a befitting emblem of W. B. Yeats’s hesitation to submit this now iconic poem to public view. One of the rarest Yeats publications, it is the fourth of only 25 copies that he allowed to be printed between completing the poem in September 1916 and publishing a slightly revised version (which eliminated the comma from the title) in The New Statesman in October 1920. The poem’s origin may be traced to Maud Gonne’s May 1916 letter asserting that ‘the greatness of the sacrifice’ of the executed rebels brought ‘tragic dignity’ to ‘the Irish cause.’ On the heels of this missive, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory that ‘I am trying to write a poem on the men executed— “terrible beauty has been born again”.’ That haunting refrain first appears in the opening stanza of the ensuing poem as part of Yeats’s palinode, or recantation, of the claim he had made in ‘September 1913’ (one of the Poems Written in Discouragement) that ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.’ As suggested by the letter in the Exhibit, Yeats’s discouragement in 1913 was fueled by Dublin’s failure to accept an offer by Gregory’s nephew Hugh Lane to donate his valuable collection of paintings if the city built a suitable gallery. Yeats’s bleak assessment in ‘September 1913’ has been transformed—‘changed utterly’—by the terrible beauty of 1916.
Yeats worked on the poem while staying with, and unsuccessfully
proposing marriage to, Maud Gonne in the summer of 1916. He completed Easter, 1916 and dated it September 25, 1916 while staying with Lady Gregory at Coole. One reason he hesitated to publish may have been Gonne’s challenge to the poem’s assertion that ‘Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.’ She didn’t mince words: ‘No, I don’t like your poem,’ she wrote on 8 November. You ‘know quite well that sacrifice has never yet turned a heart to stone though it has immortalized many & through it alone mankind can rise to God….’ This tension bears out Gonne’s claim in a 1911 letter to Yeats that she ‘was the Father’ of his poems, ‘sowing the unrest & storm which made them possible & you the mother who brought them forth in suffering.…’ ‘Easter, 1916’ immortalizes the rebels, murmuring ‘name upon name, / As a mother names her child’, even as it wonders, ‘And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?’
Another reason for delay is apparent in Yeats’s May 1917 letter to
John Quinn in which he says The Wild Swans at Coole will be expanded ‘if the war ending enables me to add two poems I have written about Easter week in Dublin.’ By this time he had already decided on the limited private publication by Clement Shorter, to whom he sent a copy on 28 March 1917. His letter explained the delay from September in terms of his and Gregory’s efforts to convince England that Ireland was morally entitled to the paintings that Hugh Lane had intended to bequeath to Ireland at the time of his death in the sinking of the Lusitania. Gregory, Yeats wrote, ‘asked me not to send it you until we had finished our dispute with the authorities about the Lane pictures. She is afraid of it getting about & damaging us & she is not timid.’
Yeats knew that his and Gregory’s play Cathleen Ni Houlihan had
gradually but inexorably become an alluring image of the redemptive power of sacrificing one’s life for Ireland. ‘Did that play of mine,’ he would ask, ‘send out / Certain men the English shot?’ The Clement Shorter Easter, 1916 captures Yeats’s state of mind in the wake of the executions. He is reluctant to start the process by which his poem’s reception will transmute the historical fact of those deaths into the myth of a terrible beauty by which ‘All changed, changed utterly.’ Yeats’s hesitation mirrored the ambivalence about the Rising that permeates his text. From the vantage point of this centenary, it is clear that Yeats’s incantatory words made his poem synonymous with its subject. The Exhibit’s Easter, 1916 provides a snapshot of the uncertain setting forth when the poem hovered between history and myth.
Yeats’s Easter, 1916
Letter of Maud Gonne to W. B. Yeats 15 September 1911
©2016
Yeats’s Easter, 1916
‘Our children were your poems of which I was the Father sowing the unrest & storm which made them possible & you the mother who brought them forth in suffering & in the highest beauty & our children had wings –’