The Progression of Naming in Yeats' "Easter, 1916"

Julian Stern

In W.B. Yeats’ "Easter, 1916", the author expresses his mixed feelings about Easter Rising, the unsuccessful revolt of the Irish against the British. Yeats manipulates the feelings of the reader by explicitly naming figures prominent in the uprising at one point in the poem and mentioning them generically at other points.

Yeats begins by referring to unnamed persons, saying, “I met them at close of day/ Coming with vivid faces.” He makes sure to not introduce anyone by name at the beginning so as to not bring out biases in the reader for or against certain characters in his poem, who we later find out are key players in the Easter Rising. Despite the namelessness, he makes sure that the reader knows that the people he meets are not random members of the masses by describing their faces as vivid.

Yeats goes on in the second stanza to reveal a little bit more about the characters, describing their mannerisms and actions, but continuing to leave them nameless. This stanza holds many clues to the identity of the characters, the most explicit being, “This man had kept a school,” which is a reference to Patrick Pearce, a leader of the revolt. At this point in the poem, a reader familiar with the subject matter may be aware of the people Yeats is referencing, but the biases are not as much of a threat because the first stanza breaks them down with its obscurity.

It is not until the end of the last stanza that Yeats names the figures he has been speaking of: “MacDonagh and MacBride/ And Connolly and Pearse.” It is also not until the last stanza that he shows any thought about their death with the words “And what if excess of love/ Bewildered them til they died?” Although he references the futility of the revolt from the start when he mentions making fun of the leaders to his friends, it is not until he has to face the actual existence of the figures as people that he recognizes the loss.

WORKS CITED
Yeats, W.B., The Poems: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983.