Easter, 1916

One of Yeats’ primary questions, or aspects of confusion, in “Easter, 1916” is whether the rebels’ actions were ultimately worthwhile, or if their cause was worth the loss of life. He compares their stalwart determination to an unchanging stone in a riverbed but notes that the living world around them is actually one full of change and evolution. He writes, “Minute by minute they change” (Line 48), and revisits a version of that phrase twice more within the third stanza. The stones are not unequivocally good for the stream, but rather they “trouble” it (Line 44), a world with a slightly negative connotation. Later, Yeats names their determination as “excess of love” (Line 72) and posits that this position “Bewildered them till they died” (Line 73). While he values the memorializing of the rebels, he seems to think that their stalwart commitment to the cause is not necessarily a clearly heroic stance.

As an Irishman, Yeats would have understood the significance that an allusion to Easter would hold for his fundamentally Irish Catholic reader base; by calling on the most important event in Christianity, he establishes the stakes of the poem, and contrasts the human experience with the divine.