Background Note: In stanza two of "Easter 1916," Yeats talks about a number of people without naming them, but his audience would have been able to identify them immediately as various leaders of the failed Easter 1916 rebellion, the most electrifying moment in 20th-century Irish history, in which Irish rebels--many of whom were poets and teachers--took over the Dublin General Post Office (a symbol of British imperial power) and issued the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a document proclaiming Irish independence from Britain. One of the leaders of the rebellion was Padraic Pearse, poet, teacher, and author of "The Rebel," also on your reading list for today.

Focus Questions:

1. The Yeats and Pearse poems concern one of the eternal questions, one that Hamlet soliloquized about: what is the moral course of action, to fight oppression, or to endure it? What is each poet's attitude toward that question--and what is your own?
 

2. Does the Easter Rebellion of 1916 change Yeats' perception of the people who led it?  How so?  What is his relationship to them?  How do the images in stanza three of "Easter 1916" relate to the poem as a whole?
  

 

3. "Easter 1916" speaks of transformation; as Yeats writes, "All changed, changed utterly:/ A terrible beauty is born."  Try to identify *what* has transformed, according to Yeats in this poem, and also identity the terrible beauty--what is it that gets born in the wake of Easter 1916?