1916 Ezra Pound came into W.B. Yeats’s life in 1913, in London. For the next three years they were constantly in each other’s company – Pound always the mentor, Yeats the pupil. The influence of Pound drastically revised Yeats’s view of Ireland, which swivelled over these years from Romantic to anti-Romantic. The shift is aggressively proclaimed in his poem ‘September 1913’, with its refrain:
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Politics replaced Schwärmerei. There would be no more ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’. Yeats was now an ‘engaged’ poet. But what, in the maelstrom of world war and the 1916 Easter Uprising (‘Revolution’ some called it), did ‘engagement’ mean?
The Uprising was the more difficult of the two crises. While England was preoccupied with fighting the Germans in France, a band of Irish Nationalists decided that this would be the moment at which to mount a coup and seize independence for their country. The symbolism (Easter being the moment of spiritual rebirth in the Christian calendar) and the quixotic heroism would resound through Irish history eternally. But as a coup, it was a disastrous flop.
The Uprising began on the morning of Easter Monday, 24 April, with a street demonstration by some 1,000 Dubliners. At their head, a commando of rebels set out to capture and take over the major buildings in the capital: principally the Dublin General Post Office.
It was pure romanticism. And it failed, utterly. The rebels had rifles, the British occupiers had much heavier armament – and knew, having been at war for two years, how to use it. The British garrison quickly mustered and moved in massive strength against the rebels (‘criminals’, as they were proclaimed). Ruthlessness was ordered: the government, in London, regarded it as a stab in the back while the British Isles (which included Ireland) were in a desperate fight to the death with Germany.
No quarter was given. Martial law was declared and the counterattack began. Artillery was used, mercilessly. A gunboat was floated along the Liffey river. The collateral damage was huge. But in a couple of days, the rebellion was effectively squashed. The leaders of the rebellion were shown no mercy. They were tried in secret by a military court and sentenced to death, the executions announced only after they had been summarily carried out.
Militarily, it was a blinding success for the British. But the huge civilian casualties (over 1,000 non-combatants were killed), the wanton destruction of some of the most beautiful parts of the city, and the cruelty of the punishment did what the rebels themselves had been unable to do. The Irish independence movement was, hereafter, historically unstoppable. It would happen five years later.
This is Yeats’s poetic meditation on that bloody event, offered in his poem ‘Easter 1916’ – a meditation as simple in its expression, and complex in its resonance, as its title. It opens:
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:
A terrible beauty is born.
What is Yeats saying here? That his inactivity – as an intellectual, artist observer of the scene – is culpable, or the proper response of a commonsensical ideologue to these head-in-the-air ‘clownish’ (motleyed) idealists? Is he, like Stephen Daedalus’s God (in Joyce’s 1916 novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), above it all, like a superior being paring his fingernails while below him frogs and mice go at their little wars?
Were these men fools, or patriotic heroes? If the latter, what did that make William Butler Yeats? The poem (completed in September 1916, while the events were still white hot, but in military perspective) continues, reviewing the actions of the rebels, and the inaction of men and women of Yeats’s kind. It ends with a salute to the heroes of the uprising, a chilling refrain, and an unanswered, perhaps unanswerable, question:
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died? […]
[All] Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Things were simpler on the Lake Isle than in Dublin in Easter 1916.