248

History and Myth in Yeats's 'Easter 1916'

TERRY EAGLETON

YEATS wrote his Easter 1916 in the September of that

year, over three months after the execution of the leaders
of the uprising; and this time-intervallong enough for the
event's implications to be deeply pondered, too brief for
any hard historical conclusions to be drawnis crucial for
the poem's emotional structure. Like many mature Yeats
poems, Easter 1916 combines confidently affirmative state-
ment with a candid confession of painfully unresolved
ambiguities; the point of the ballad-refrain is to create a
framework within which a rhetorical firmness can be
played off against the terse, shifting notations of conflicting,
even contradictory, attitudes:

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 . . .

Like other Yeats poems also, the business of the poetic

language is to separate, clarify and define, rather than
cryptically connate, the ambiguous feelings it handles. The
ambiguities belong to the historical experience, as it were,
rather than to the language which records it; and to this
extent the purity of the poem's diction (as often in Yeats)
suggests its capacity to stand over against, and take the
measure of, the fluctuating complexities of the recorded
event and its confused aftermath. This is not to suggest
that there aren't points at which the confusion infiltrates
the poem's own language, as I hope to show; rather that the
decisive tone of the poem is established by its strategy of
admitting the presence of complexities while simultaneous-
ly fending them off, either muting them to a disturbing
YEATS'S 'EASTER 1916' 249
resonance just beneath the poem's surface or gathering
them into lie affirmative statement.
This tension between the achieved poise of the poetic
act, and the blurred, unfinished business it presents, is
central to the poem's meaning. Easter 1916 is, evidently
enough, the creation of a myth: its aim is less to comment
analytically on the dead rebels than to 'write (them) out in
a verse', so that what matters is the ritualising act of the
art itself, defining its own limits and setting its own terms.
In this sense, a refusal to pursue critical analysis which
might undermine the myth can emerge as decorousproper
to the genrerather than as cautiously evasive; Yeats can
turn his own political reservations to poetic use, inserting
qualifications which make their point but leave the elegiac
balance undisturbed, since the death of the rebels has in
any case rendered them irrelevant. Since the executions
have prepared the ground for transmuting history into
myth, replacing unresolved complexity with distanced
finality, the English themselves have conveniently rendered
further questioning redundant. The poem's language is thus
not forced to be more uncomfortably specific in its moral
criticism of the rebels, since there is properly nothing to
be specific aboutnothing, after the deaths, left to analyse:

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.

The urgent question raised in the third and fourth lines

is neither answered nor evaded; the possibility needs to be
entertained, but the movement of the poetry, intent on
250 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
passing beyond shifting historical uncertainty to the per-
manent stillness of myth, can take it easily in its stride,
neither over-emphasising nor underplaying its significance. It
is important for Yeats's general doubts about the reliability
of revolutionary emotion, and the relation of these doubts
to his total attitude to the Irish situation, that the issue
should be raised; but in the particular case of the executed
rebels it can be courteously waived, if only because the
answers are quite literally no longer important This tension
between a general attitude, and one particular to the dead
leaders, is central to the poem: for if the affirmative feelings
are directed on the whole towards the dead, the hesitations
relate to the general historical context they have aban-
doned. In this sense, by separating the rebels from those
historical doubtsor, more exactly, by exploiting the fact
that the English have severed that connection by executing
theman affirmation of the rebels is possible which is in
in fact more limited in its general application than the
poem's tone would in part suggest.
As a piece of myth-creation, then, the poem is able to
create its own reality, gathering and distancing the dead
into the artifice of mythology; yet it does so with an
uneasily analytic eye on the course of an objective history
external to itself: the loose ends and incalculable effects
of the uprising itself, still too contemporary an occurrence
to be controlled and finalised within the poem's own art.
From one viewpoint, the poignancy of Easter 1916 lies in
its bold decision to mythologise the dead before the objec-
tive validity of that actionthe assurance that it is more
than subjectivecan be historically confirmed, and to do
so in full awareness of the risks and exposures involved:
risks and exposures which, by courting the possibility of
a rash prematureness, reflect the problematical character
of the uprising itself. Yeats, bitterly certain that he had
lived where motley is worn, has already been badly caught
out once, forced into a humiliating volte face; the courage
of the poem lies not merely-in admitting a reversal, but in
risking another. From another viewpoint, though, that
exposure is by no means unmitigated: there are senses
(more subtle than the striking oxymoron of 'terrible
YEATS'S 'EASTER 1916' 251
beauty') in which the poem covers itself defensively from
the pitfalls of premature commitment:
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 . . .

The gathering crescendo of that first line promises a

pregnant insight; yet the subsequent statement says much
less than it appears to. What it actually says is that the
heroes are changed and will be so for all timebut only,
as the lines stand, in the platitudinous sense that every
historical truth is true for all time. It is only the crucial
reference to the wearing of green (ringing a change on the
first stanza's 'motley') which implies that the transforma-
tion will be fertilising: received and lived out in the future.
And this meaning, which the rhetorical resonance invites
one to read in while simultaneously withdrawing any sub-
stantial evidence, must be played off against the literal
sense of the lines, which promises and prophesises much
less. That local ambiguity draws its force from one of the
poem's more comprehensive paradoxes: the fact that what
it asserts as utterly permanent is, ironically, a change.
Death, in a fruitful ambivalence, is both transformation
and finality; and a 'permanent change' can mean either one
which brings you to a finalised, unalterable condition, or
one which will be perpetually re-created in its effects. The
lines quoted above say the first while hinting at the second:
in this way the poem covers its losses under the shield of
its rhetorical tone. 'History' and 'myth'the real, unpredic-
table upshot of the events and the urge to draw them in
the present, despite that worrying aftermath, into an
achieved permanencestand in uneasy interrelation; a
sharp historical consciousness is retained, but also played
off against the moral imperative which motivates the poet
to mythologise the event now, in generous inattention to
historical contingency. In its combination of a shrewd
252 ESSAYS m CRITICISM
historical sense with a boldly affirmative impulse which
cuts self-sufficiently through history's mere complexities,
the poem reveals a characteristic duality in Yeats's general
sensibility. Moreover, both 'historical' and 'mythical' per-
spectives share a similar quality: both in their different
ways distance the recorded event, the first by hinting at
its relativity and therefore qualifying any over-eager claim
for its centrality, the second by removing it from the realm
of temporal contingency into the shadowy dimension of
eternal achievement. In this sense, there is a quality of
essential detachment inherent in the mythical treatment
itself, carried over, as it were, from Yeats's prudent his-
torical hesitations; and in this way a glorification of the
dead can be achieved without an unreserved commitment
to their historical importance.
This two-fold tendencythe mythical affirmation and the
counterpointing historical uneasinessemerges most clearly
in the subtle changes rung, just beneath the poem's surface,
on a set of key-notes: dream, drama, art, illusion, reality.
The poem's opening lines juxtapose the heroic mythology
of 'vivid faces' with the familiar realities of 'counter and
desk'; yet the issue refuses to resolve itself to a simple
counterposing of former illusion and present truth:

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 . . .

'They' in that ninth line may refer either to the rebels with
whom the poet has spoken, or to the club-companions; in
either case, the interchanges of artifice and reality are
interestingly complex. If 'they' refers to the companions,
then the 'motley', it would seem, is a gesture outwards to
YEATS'S 'EASTER 1916' 253
the rebels: their posturing theatricality, the sceptical Yeats
believed, shared in, as well as reacted against, the brittle
unrealities of the clubmen's blandness, in a counterpointing
of neurosis and complacency. Yet if the rebels pose his-
trionically behind assumed masks, so does the less-than-
candid Yeats who exchanges polite conversation with them
while conscious of his jeers (in an equally artificial club
setting) behind their backs. Again, if 'they' refers to the
rebels, then the motley perhaps attaches more closely to
the clubmen themselves: the implication then may be that
it is the shallowness of Ireland, rather than the rebels' own
ideals, which renders them ludicrous. Both meanings seem
present: it is, at any rate, not clear who wears the motley,
and Yeats, through the ambivalence of that 'they*, is
stranded at a confused point between a common (if critical)
front with the rebels against pervasive foolery and a con-
temptuous alliance with the clubmen against them.
The certainty that motley is worn has now, of course,
been radically undermined, as Utopian dream converts in
part to historical reality; yet the poem's language still
insists on the elements of illusion within the new creation:

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 . . .

The previous judgment on John McBride is both formally

retracted {'dreamed') and restated: the old assumptions
weremust have beendelusions, yet the fact of the 'most
bitter wrong' still stands, to qualify the thoroughness of
the transition. The new events have revised previous his-
tory, but not so much by showing it in a different light as
by breaking to a new level which both leaves it intact and
renders it redundant; and in this sense history seems both
254 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
cancelled and preserved by what has happened, in a dis-
orientating merging of perspectives. Thus, no such similar
confession of former misapprehension is extended to the
case of Connie Markievicz, whose previous image ('What
voice more sweet than hers/ When, young and beautiful,/
She rode to harriers?1) still resists the necessary revision;
and McBride, in any case, seems to have resigned from the
casual comedy, disengaged from artifice and illusion, only
to assume the alternative dramatic role-playing of revolu-
tionary heroism. He is 'changed in his turn', ritually
exchanging one mask for another ('motley' for 'green'); and
the passive verb distances and qualifies the personal charac-
ter of the transformation, allowing him the objective glory
of martyrdom while staying quiet, uncommittedly neutral,
about the personal change which he may have actively
achieved, as a moral agent, in the process.
The upshot of this sense that events have passed not only
from illusion to reality but also, confusingly, from one
dramatic artifice to another, is that reality itself seems
dissolved rather than consolidated by what has occurred.
The relations between dream, history, myth and drama
are deeply obscured: if pre-uprising history was dream and
complacent artifice, present history seems at once more
and less 'real' than what went beforethe concrete enact-
ment of a vague Utopian vision, an intersection of dream
and reality which seems to have had the disturbing effect
of disembodying both. Isolated from their historical conse-
quences, the deaths of the leaders are indubitably substan-
tial : the only substantial fact, indeed, on which Yeats can
go to work. Yet they are also, in their way, a 'disembodying',
a dissolution and negation; and this, even more sharply, is
how they appear when they are returned to their historical
context. If the events in question have the undeniable
solidity of stone, it is stone grasped in terms of its blurring,
dissipating, de-realising effect on the living stream of
history:

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
YEATS'S 'EASTER 1916' 255
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 i t . . .

The subjective illusion of 'enchanted' is fused with the hard

objectivity of 'stone': the event is at once irreducibly con-
crete and vapidly elusive. What the stone symbolises is
human hearts, a living historical action; but, at least by
the end of this stanza, 'stone' stands in a similar relation
to "heart* as myth stands to history, emerging from it organi-
cally, yet also, in its transmuting of turbulent feeling to
impersonal stillness, opaque and remote, difficult to dissolve
back into human realities:

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.

The stone's symbolic reference to human agency ('hearts')

has now been muted, leaving it a disconnected, autono-
mous, impenetrably mysterious object within the stream. It
is the sheer, uninterpretable fact of its inert, depersonalised
presence, its immovable, bruise-like insistence within the
living flesh of Ireland which these lines stress, dislocating
it from the human reference with which it was introduced.
By the end of the stanza, the stone can be related back
only with an effort to the hearts it symbolises, as the new
image of McBride is both a growth out of, and radically
discontinuous with, his former state.
The point of the overall metaphor of the stanza is to
sustain this duality of vision: to urge at once the living
process of the event ('history') and its strange, stone-like
inscrutability ('myth'). Thus, the imagery of stone and
256 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM
stream 'naturalises' the disruptive rebellion, transmuting
it effortlessly to an organic disturbance within the texture
of a known landscape; but by the same token it distances
and depersonalises what has occurred to an elusively
obscure process which can be registered rather than under-
stood. The metaphor, that is, dignifies but also withdraws
the historical experience, gracing and stylising the bloody
events while holding them simultaneously at arm's length.
It achieves simple definition at the cost of a calculated
externalisation; and to this extent it evokes feelings of
alienness and naturalness together. Both qualities fuse in
the word 'stone', but they co-exist less satisfactorily in
the stanza as a whole. Thus, reality has been dissolved and
perhaps re-ordered by the new events, yet the precise
relationship between 'stone' and 'stream' is surely vague.
The stone 'troubles' the stream, but also lies inertly at its
heart: it acts on the stream, stirring and disintegrating
its waters, yet the end of the stanza ('The stone's in the
midst of all') also insists on imaging it as a reality in itself,
bluntly present but stolidly inactive. That there is a real
ambiguity here is evident enough in the verbal shift from
'Minute by minute they (horses, rider, birds) change' to
'Minute by minute they (moor-hens) live': the first image
envisages a landscape pervasively altered by the stone-
created ripples, whereas the second seems to point up the
mysteriousness of living processes which persist in their
usual modes of being despite an 'objective' change of con-
text The ambiguities of real historyhas the event changed
anything or not?here infiltrate lie poem's own language:
the simple nature images, which seemed a way of control-
ling, perhaps 'domesticating' the experience by rooting it
in a familiar landscape, turn out to be ways of suggesting,
but not adequately tackling, the complexity of what is at
stake. The stone seems both to have metamorphosed the
natural process and left it curiously intact, in a way which
evokes the previous ambiguous relation between history
before and after the uprising; and the joint effect of these
two perspectives is to hint at a real change which is never-
theless too deep-seated and all-embracing to be concretely
localised. The poem's own imagery is certainly unable to
YEATS'S 'EASTER 1916' 257
do more than feel after it, deploying 'objective' metaphor
which promises, but fails, to 'objectify'. The change is
pervasive enough to be insubstantial; and the persistence
of the moor-hens' calls places an implicit question-mark
over that substantiality, intimating a contrast between
enduring natural reality and short-lived political turmoil
which directly reverses the main tendency of the stanza's
general metaphor: its integration of 'politics' into 'nature'.
A stone which disturbs running water is in one sense
'natural' (part of the landscape), in another sense an inter-
ference with nature; and the inherent ambiguity of the
image reflects Yeats's conflicting attitudes. Similarly, the
stone's coldness and hardness is vividly evoked, but also
softened by the appealing implications of 'enchanted'; and
if the image of hearts turned to stone criticises the 'fana-
ticism' of the rebellion, it also suggests, more sympatheti-
cally, the stilled hearts of the executed leaders.
This set of ambiguities relates to a more general hesitation
in the stanza: the question of whether the transformations
at issue are 'subjective' or 'objective'. If the changes in
horse and rider are subjective, part of a troubling inner
disorientation projected onto the scene, the shifting of
birds, clouds and shadows are objective enough; and the
difficulty is to grasp the point of their close juxtaposition.
The relation, in fact, is not successfully clarified: the stanza
moves cryptically from images which suggest disintegrating
illusion to a sense of routine objective flux, thus presenting
that flux as both alien disturbance and organic continuity.
Thus, the anxious sense of a dissolving reality is checked
by an emphasis on change as natural and cyclical; but
equally, that natural cycle is caught up into, and by implica-
tion made to share in, the dissolutions of the first, 'subjec-
tive' set of images. The poem, in other words, is radically
uncertain in its choice between seeing a subjective loss of
stability as no more alarming, and no less organically inevit-
able, than objective natural change, and, more gloomily,
implying that natural reality is itself damagingly under-
mined by the human alterations which have taken place.
So the absorption of history into nature cuts both ways:
258 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM

it graces and naturalises the unfamiliar, but only at the

cost of rendering nature itself alien.
If the relation between the 'subjective' and 'objective'
is imprecisely achieved here, however, it is put to powerful
effect elsewhere, in the poem's 'Are changed, changed
utterly' refrain. The phrase is, of course, grimly ironic: it
refers at once to the mythical transformation which the
rebels have undergone in the eyes of the Irish, and to the
historical fact that the English have converted them into
corpses. Here 'subjective' and 'objective' meanings force-
fully interlock, defining a single event Yet the poem's
characteristic tension persists within this unity: for if its
objective aspect points to failure, its subjective meaning
suggests heroic achievement 'Utterly' evokes in the same
breath the tragic finality of the rebels' death and the
gloriously unalterable completeness of their new signi-
fiance. The passive verb 'are changed' both qualifies and
celebrates: it deprives the rebels of personal, self-creating
autonomy by insisting (with an echo of the poem's general
imagery of dramatic artifice and role-playing) on the
thoroughness with which they have been reduced to the
manipulated puppets of uncontrollable historical forces;
yet it simultaneously exploits this victimised depersonalisa-
tion for the mysterious impersonality of heroic myth. In
this way, it can transplant the dead from the contingencies
of history to the inviolable security of myth without allow-
ing the central historical fact of their failure to be lost
sight of.
The dialectic of history and myth in Easter 1916 has a
peculiar relevance to Yeats's own complex relation to the
events he records, and it is worth adding a final comment
on this. One major element of that relation is guilt; yet
the guilt is not simple. To have been certain that motley
was worn was, after all, to have had at one's disposal an
evaluative perspective which went beyond the blindnesses
of others, and out of which the confident judgment on
the 'motley' could be made; and in that sense Yeats can
defend himself from a charge of mindless complacency,
in a way which both provides a precarious bridge to his
present, revised attitude and saves him, if not from guilt,
YEATS'S 'EASTER 1916' 259
then at least from accusations of opportunism. The guilt,
then, springs from seeing one's own jettisoned idealism
tragically revived by others; and to that extent the poet
is both external to what has occurred and yet has a title
to participate, recognising the relation between the rebels'
motives and his own discarded hopes. Yeats's own par-
ticipation in the event is, of course, the poem itself: his
'part* in the drama is to transform it to permanence by
ritually invoking the names of its protagonists:
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name on name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild . . .
The mother's naming is both purposeless (the child sleeps,
unconscious of her presence) and yet an intimate benedic-
tion; she is excluded by the child's sleep, reduced to a
merely external presence, yet the child is of her flesh.
Through this image, then, Yeats confesses his own guilty
estrangement from contemporary history at the same time
as he obliquely claims a kind of maternity, acknowledging
the uprising and its aftermath as the alien children of his
own idealism. In a parallel way, the 'myth' of the poem both
creates, and yet is subservient to, the historical material
with which it deals. The naming (a murmuring, in any case,
rather than an affirmative chant) must follow on the real
history, when the wildness has wound itself out into deathly
sleep; yet although in this sense myth merely revives and
re-creates a history already finished and done with, the
contrary implicationthat event becomes history by the
power of art and mythis also active, providing the artist
with a self-consciously restricted yet centrally significant
role. The act of naming is both a passive recording of objec-
tive reality and a way of having it on one's own, creative
and subjective terms; and this interaction between terse
transcription and assured personal declaration sets the
poem's tone. Thus, the weighty rhetorical confidence, in
the case of McBride, of 'Yet I number him in the song' (a
260 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM

confidence firm enough to imply that the possibility of

actually rejecting McBride from the poem lies within the
poet's own free choice) co-exists with the modest, limited
artistic purpose which the line actually defines. Myth, art
and illusion grow out of historical reality and conform
to its pressures; yet reciprocally, a dream has created an
event: and with this assurance behind it, the poem can
generate its own myth with genuine, if qualified, confidence
in its efficacy.

Wadham College, Oxford.