"Easter, 1916"

William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

“Easter, 1916” manuscript draft written in the end papers of Gregory’s copy of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, vol. 3

Stratford-on-Avon, Imprinted at the Shakespeare Head Press 1908

Yeats finally sanctioned open publication of “Easter, 1916” in November 1920 at the height of the Irish War of Independence. Much of the poem’s force derives from its taut uncertainty about the “terrible beauty” the Rising had birthed. In this fair copy of the final stanza, inscribed on the fly-leaf of a volume of his Collected Works, Yeats wonders about the appropriate limits of nationalist fervor—can “excess of love” be justified if it leads to direct violence?—and about what part writers such as himself could now play in Ireland. His ballad-like ending asserts that the executed leaders—“MacDonagh and MacBride / Connolly and Pearse”—are now “changed utterly” and to be remembered forever.