W.B. Yeats

Yeats was a famous poet before the Easter Rising of 1916, but the execution of these Irish independence fighters (and many of these fighters were poets) were a huge reason Yeats moved back to Ireland, the place of his birth. Yeats’ work was mostly impartial and showed both the good and the bad of the independence movement, but he still inspired the revolutionary poets (Greenblatt 2021). Yeats is neither nationalist nor anti-nationalist for Ireland in his poem, “Easter, 1916”. He instead asks questions about the purpose of Irish revolution and independence. For example, he asks, “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” (Yeats 2032, ll. 67-71). Yeats is describing how the Irish know of the dreams of independence, but those same dreamers who often act on their thoughts end up dead. Yeats never tells the reader if Irish independence is worth all the death; we readers must decide for ourselves.

Our classmate Ryan Trainor discusses another Yeats poem, “The Stolen Child”, in a discussion post. Ryan is especially fond of the refrain, and one could interpret this refrain as a commentary by Yeats on his country. Ryan states:

“This refrain and how it changes in the last stanza is one of my favorite aspects of The Stolen Child. It sets the tone for the story and the narration throughout the poem, with such choric verse as, "Come away, O human child! \ To the waters and the wild \ With a faery, hand in hand, \ for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand." Not only is this refrain begging the child to come away to the faerys' world of "waters" and "wild," but it also serves as a commentary for Yeats on how he sees his own world” (Ryan Trainor, “Yeats - The Stolen Child, refrain, narrative and magic”).

Ryan’s interpretation of the narrator begging the child to come away could be an allusion for Yeats asking Ireland to break away from Britain. Yeats could also be alluding to the violence in Ireland when he states, “the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand” (Yeats 2023, ll. 12, 27, 41, 53). But we readers really never know for sure where Yeats falls out in the idea of Irish independence. Clearly, Yeats sympathized with and influenced his Irish countrymen, but he also clearly saw the costs that would come with war.