Okay, Yeats is not poet I have read until recently, and even now it is merely a skip through a complete works; reading the shorter rather than the extended poems. I have almost been teased into him. Once by being queried on my mis-quoting one of his most quoted lines without my realising it. After this by finding many listings on the internet about or suggesting his best poems. Another, by finding a complete volume of his work, with dates and notes included. (I always like to see the date of a poem’s inception included in publications.) It includes quite a long intro. to his life and then voluminous notes to the poems. Which are both disconcerting and encouraging me to discover his poetry. I understand his ‘books’ should be read as books and not my toe-dipping activities at this time. I will progress to more serious ‘study’ and expect to benefit from it.
I have wandered through the book and find I enjoy his style, albeit reading his shorter poems and ignoring the long. I have kept a note of those catching my attention and will put them up on another occasion. The poem below was written a few months after the Easter Uprising in Dublin. Under that poem I have added a link to the Poetry Foundation’s page of the poem and an essay on it. It is not for me to report on the event, I did read that Yeats tried not to be political in his writing, that he believed in the romance of poetry, the Romance of Myths and Heritage, even developing or massaging ancient legends in his stories. Yet on my simple reading of Easter, 1916, I feel he believes in his repeated lines ending each verse: ‘All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born.’ A change in an Irish landscape, humanscape that was as significant as the ongoing World War. Maybe his sympathy was for the ‘brief and bloody actions of people, idealists, and poets,’ as a myth in the making, foreseeing ‘heroic’ names to echo through the years. And over a hundred years later the Easter Rising at the Dublin Post Office is still casting both shadow and spell of bloody fact and mythology.
Easter, 1916
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
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
Or 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.
That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
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 birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they 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;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.
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.
September 25, 1916
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70114/william-butler-yeats-easter-1916
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