Easter, 1916

“Easter, 1916” is, at its heart, a historical poem written in direct response to the Easter Uprising of 1916 in Ireland, when Irish rebels mounted an Uprising against oppressive British rule. Their failure resulted in the execution of key leaders, including those Yeats names in the fourth stanza of his poem. Although Yeats always valued Irish culture, narratives, and mythologies in his writings and works, he had ambivalent feelings about the methods many of the rebels employed in response to British tyrannical rule. Despite this, Yeats was compelled to memorialize the rebels and the Rising in verse. Critic Ange Mlinko notes, “Yeats calls upon the act of writing to preserve collective memory […] In the end, ‘Easter, 1916’ is less of a political poem than an elegy. We read it because it is, in the strange way poems are, alive. And by naming, it animates the dead in turn” (Mlinko, Ange. “William Butler Yeats: ‘Easter, 1916’.” Poetry Foundation, 15 Apr. 2014). Although Yeats had reluctant feelings about the politics and actions of the rebels, he nevertheless identified the value of memorializing the specific Irish men and women in history.