Easter 1916
I
I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
With polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
[. . .]
III
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the bird that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change.
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive
And hens to moor-cocks call
Minute by minute they live;
The stone’s in the midst of all.
IV
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night, but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died
I write it out in a 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.
W B Yeats, from “Easter 1916”
The best Easter poems are not satisfied with being about Easter. Poets use them to pursue other issues and concerns, or delve so deeply into complex meanings that the poems are merely stimulated by the season and are not even in celebration of it.
There are famous examples of this. Perhaps the best known ‘Easter poem’ in West Indian literature is Mervyn Morris’s dramatic suite “On Holy Week,” which the poet once said during one of his famous readings of it, that he originally started to write it because he had begun to discover that people generally
