Volume 2, Issue 1 Summer 2016 1 READING IRELAND THE LITTLE MAGAZINE Table of Contents 02 Introduction 05 “Culture Warriors: Exploring Sources on Gaelic League Organisers” by Cuan Ó Seireadáin. 14 The Irish Review 1911-1914 by Adrienne Leavy 22 “O when may it suffice?”: Yeats, the Rising, and the Poetry of Difficult Times by Gregory Castle 34 The Irish Writers Center: A Poet’s Rising. Newly commissioned poems from Theo Dorgan, Paul Muldoon, Thomas McCarthy, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Jessica Traynor 36 Signatories: A theatrical and literary commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising commissioned by University College Dublin, with artistic responses by Emma Donoghue, Thomas Kilroy, Hugo Hamilton, Frank McGuinness, Rachel Fehily, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Marina Carr and Joseph O’ Connor Subscribe Every quarter, Reading Ireland will publish an E-Journal, Reading Ireland: The Little Magazine, which will be available to subscribers for an annual fee of $40. The magazine will be published in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. The aim of this publication is to provide in-depth analysis of Irish literature, past and present, through a series of essays and articles written by myself and other Irish and American writers and academics, along with opening a window onto the best of contemporary Irish poetry, prose and drama. To honor the tradition of Irish Literary Magazines, each issue will also focus on a specific “Little Magazine” from the first half of the twentieth-century. http://www.readingireland.net 40 Journal reviews: Boyne Berries, Poetry Ireland and The Stinging Fly by Adrienne Leavy 48 Review of R.F. Foster’s Vivid Faces: “The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 18901923” by James Moran 52 Was it for this? Reflections on the Easter Rising and what it means to us now. Edited by Ronan McGreevy. 58 Spotlight on 1916 Centenary publications from Cork University Press and the Royal Irish Academy 62 Louth County Museum exhibit: Birth of a Nation – The Evolution of Irish Nationhood, 1641-1916 65 McClelland Library exhibit: Remembering the Easter Rising: Historical Context and Cultural Legacy. 66 Easter Rising Stories: the documentary films of Marcus Howard. Contributors Editor: Adrienne Leavy Design: Eric Montgomery – giantboy.com * The cover photo is a copy of the Police Pass issued to Miss Rosalie Byrne to enable her to cycle through Dublin city to her home on Lower Mount 6WGXULQJ(DVWHU:HHNHQG%\UQHZKRZDVRQHRIWKHÀUVWZRPHQWR qualify as a Pharmacist in Ireland, was studying in Dublin at the time of the Rising. She was the paternal grandmother of the editor. 1 “O when may it suffice?”: W.B. Yeats, the Rising, and the Poetry of Difficult Times by Gregory Castle One hundred years from this time Will anybody change their minds And find out one thing or two about life? People are always talking, You know they’re always talking. Everybody’s so wrong That I know it’s gonna work out right. Nobody knows what kind of trouble we’re in. Nobody seems to think it all might happen again. Gram Parsons, “One Hundred Years from Now” Rare early printing of W. B. Yeats’s iconic poem ‘Easter, 1916’. It is the fourth of only 25 copies that Yeats allowed to be printed between completing the poem in September 1916 and publishing a slightly revised version in The New Statesman in October 1920. This copy, published by Clement Shorter in 1917, was donated to University College Dublin by Joseph M Hassett in 2016. I would like to contemplate the role of poetry in difficult times, when faith confronts faithlessness like stone beasts thrashing on a dark plain, and I’d like to take as my text W. B. Yeats’s “Easter 1916.” We don’t really need another close reading of this great poem, nor do we need another appreciation of Yeats. We need instead a consideration of what the poem promises, specifically the way it invokes a future precisely when it seems to be commemorating the last vestige of Romantic Ireland. There is a testamentary quality to “Easter 1916”—a disposition of heroic virtues that gives equal measure to friend, helper and lout, that weaves allegory into political elegy and puts the past into play for the future, which is of course the role of poetry in difficult times. One hundred years from the now of Yeats’s poem—a time of “casual comedy” and “hearts of stone,” a time for “terrible beauty”—we can see clearly the dialectical frisson of what the poet confronted, the excitement of revolutionary movement and the additional excitement of contemplating it and recreating it in verse. These three phrases mark the argument of the poem, the points at which Yeats skewers his own elegance, throws a spanner into the dialectical process in order to prod or jolt it into new configurations that evade closure by dictating new terms for it, “in time to be, / Wherever green is worn.”1 The dialectical image of a “terrible beauty” is a process that concludes without concluding, that leaves behind an excess of meaning and possibility, a sublime surplus that the poet seizes upon as the defining characteristic of the flawed and reckless heroes he commemorates. The image of “terrible beauty” is meant to be binding, meant to support the weight of the poem’s excesses and ambiguities, its concessions and its triumphs. It is meant, in short, to be the guarantor of the future. 22 Reading Yeats’s “Easter 1916” in the centenary year of 2016 is, in a salutary sense, an exercise in failure: for how can we possibly come to such an iconic poem, one hundred years since the poet wrote down the first draft, but with expectations that have nothing to do with its words, its images and the feelings it has on reserve? We come to the poem now, one hundred years later, and we read it with the air of an audience waiting for the poem to explain itself. This was my first thought when I sat down to write this essay. It was no doubt what Yeats’s first readers thought in the autumn of 1920, when they contemplated a poem about the Rising at a time when England and Ireland were at war.2 I could spend the next half dozen pages illustrating what many great critics have said about this poem in terms of what it meant for other people back then. For this, the reader is advised to go elsewhere. What is left, after our failed expectations and the recitation of astute critics reading a great poem about an iconic event? As I’ve suggested, there is something vital left, and that something is what the poem promises. “Easter 1916” moves us not so much because we understand the words in their procession in verse, nor because we understand the idea of a “terrible beauty” that the poem solicits, the glimmer of an unrecognizable future, terrible and beautiful, that is capable of standing for a world. It moves us because we understand implicitly that what we are feeling is a promise, one that reverberates in the poem’s most minute structures, a promise that the sacrifice made for such an idea may one day suffice. But who makes this promise? We could say, facilely, the speaker, but what actually happens is that the poem itself, the vital living voice of its being read, makes this promise about sacrifice by raising questions about its very necessity. As readers, we are seduced into the speaker’s position; in being swept up by the poem’s sentiments and rhymes, rhythms and associations, we are borne along on the poet’s testament, his covenant, his promises. And all of his questions about the future become ours. As readers, we are also heirs. Yeats’s poetry is filled with such speakers, the heralds of coming times, those curious orators who face backward and march forward, in order to alert reader to the future that is right behind them, that is advancing in order to be recognized as what is to come. “Easter 1916,” with its temporality of hindsight, indicates that the path to recognition is a humbling, even downgrading one. 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. (ll. 5-15) 23 At one time, the speaker says, I have behaved in a thoughtless way with thoughtless words that have demeaned thought. I have given freely “a mocking tale or gibe” because it seemed that little else mattered. It all fell into a great “motley” that fit like a uniform, that testified to a kind of uniformity. The poet dwells on what he has done, when he but lived, when he had lingered awhile, a time when meaningless and polite things had been said—and would likely continue to be said, such is the rhetorical force of all these perfect-tense locutions. Polite society is a prevaricating ruse, a “mocking tale” or the kind of “gibe” that is filled with unspoken knowledge. The terrible thing that undoes this complacency, and the “grey / Eighteenth-century houses” (ll. 3-4) that prop it up, goes totally unheard by those around the “fire at the club,” though on the streets the newspapers were spelling it all out. Yeats himself rolled out the powder keg well in advance with Poems Written in Discouragement in 1913, which contained “September 1913,” a incendiary attack on the Dublin political establishment for its money-grubbing commercialism that also managed to deliver an eloquent eulogy to “Romantic Ireland,” proclaiming that it’s “dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave” (ll. 7-8). The dialectical excitement of the poem—social critique paired with Revival commemoration—is dampened in “Easter 1916,” but not by much. The main effect is rather a teasing out, especially in the problematic third stanza, of that which resists dialectical closure: the ambiguities and tensions of a revolutionary process that, in the earlier poem, are seemingly resolved in the melancholy recognition that Romantic Ireland is dead and gone. “Easter 1916,” by contrast, resists any such resolution and raises new questions of the sort that characterize the mature Yeats, the kind of rhetorical questions that, as Paul De Man once noted, both require and discourage an answer.3 “September 1913” comes complete with its answer, its smooth dialectical energies suitable to the polemical nature of Discouragement. “Easter 1916,” in its cadences and syntax, its stanza forms and arrangement, refuses to say clearly what is terrible and what is beautiful and, in fact, concludes by wondering if the sacrifice celebrated in the poem was necessary after all. In this respect, “Easter 1916” tell us less about revolution than about the movement into revolution, the moment when ambivalence and reflection (reflection on ambivalence) begins to displace the boneheaded certainties and ideological limits on display in the earlier poem. One hundred years on, we are living in the same moment, when stone beasts fight in the dark. In “September 1913,” Yeats revolts against a Dublin establishment that refused his proposal to build a museum for modern European and Irish art. In the stately scene of recognition that unfolds in “Easter 1916,” we see a definite change in the poet’s attitude about “Romantic Ireland.” From grief over dead ideals to bafflement before a sublime sacrifice, this “terrible beauty,” Yeats’s attitude toward social change matures. He begins to understand the crucial power of the poet to re-establish the past on a new footing, on new “grounds of recognizability,” to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, who writes that “[e]very present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time.”4 Removing the images belonging to a particular epoch threatens to decouple them from the contexts in which they were recognizable as particular kinds of images, with a local ground for meaning. “September 1913,” gains much of its power from the historical time in which the images of the poem can be recognized in a particular way (for example, as referencing Dublin Corporation attitudes about municipal investment). “Easter 1916” is tasked with finding a new localized ground for meaning, one on which Romantic Ireland takes yet another stand. In this regard, 24 it resuscitates John O’Leary, whose recalcitrant spirit menaces the formal elegance of the poem in a manner that registers the continuance of Irish resistance to oppression. It registers, too, the formal dynamics of the poem in which the images of Irish nationalist resistance (“Romantic Ireland”) are offered up to recognition once again as a vital part of the poem’s indigenous temporality, one shared by the reader who accepts its invitation. One hundred years on, we might learn much from the poet’s open invitation, his embrace, albeit ambivalent, of mocking tales and gibes. With “Easter 1916,” Yeats enters into a phase in his career that is marked by the horseman’s glance, the magisterial gaze that he casts on his own prior works as he continues to create new ones.5 Around the time he was writing “Easter 1916,” he published “The Fisherman,” a poem that explicitly rewrites and corrects his own romantic tendencies when it comes to representing the rural Irish. Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth, And the down-turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream; A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.” (ll. 21-36) An imitation driven by scorn is bound to be distorted, but it would not for that reason fail to render the kind of resemblance that the poet sought, a resemblance that is true to the experience of the Connemara man imagined by the poet, an imagined man who necessarily “does not exist,” who is necessarily nothing “but a dream.” For how else are we to read these enigmatic lines but as an address to what his own prior self imagined, a man who had misrecognized an imagined man? In “The Fisherman,” Yeats rectifies his own stance as a Revivalist who had for years confused the necessity of creating what “does not exist” with the strategy of imagining that an imagined man could stand as surety for the man himself. What the poet imagines now is the man he should have imagined, and it is for him that he seeks, while young enough for the labor, to write a poem that was effectively a new world, as “cold / And passionate as the dawn.” These lines are addressed from the standpoint of the maturing poet who has learned that misrecognition is a vital and necessary step toward the kind of poem that expresses the dawning of a new world (an elsewhere) in which an imagined man might finally be recognized.6 25 The reminder that things are not exactly what they seem was salutary in 1916, when Yeats wrote his poem about the Rising. And it’s salutary now: for we too look forward to something terrible, certainly at a minimum, something terrible this way comes. It could very well be coming toward Bethlehem. And like Yeats, we struggle with how we will recognize what comes out of this cold and passionate dawn. The question for us, as it was for Yeats, is this: will it also be beautiful? Yeats wrote “Easter 1916” in the middle of a revolt, and it seems to suggest that the energies of revolution, the desperate need for change, made possible an opening, an accommodation of people from all walks of life—the “vivid faces” on the street, the “helper and friend,” the lout— and that this accommodation itself constitutes a form of the beautiful on the national scale: the assimilation of every tension, every combative element into a singular, unified and unifying idea: the Nation.7 Of course, this accommodation is also the seedbed of a great and terrifying convulsion, pitting neighbor against neighbor. One hundred years later, as we read this poem of sacrifice, we confront only the specter of terror, of convulsion and self-destruction, without any of the accommodations—the openness and vitality of revolution as movement itself—that make disparate people into comrades-in-arms. What is missing for us, today, is the dialectical balance of terror and beauty that had provided a starting point for the Irish nation and its people and that stabilized sublimity (the terrible) under the founding power of beauty. On this view, “Easter 1916” promises an accommodation, a balancing act in the name of humanity, in which the individual is commemorated even as the nation’s drive toward an independent future takes aim at the very qualities of individualism—heroic recklessness, courage, creativity, openness, love—that Yeats had long promoted. This balance, like the frisson of what is best and worst in us, is also missing, one hundred years along. “An Irish Airman foresees His Death,” written just after “Easter 1916,” articulates with dialectical serenity this balancing act between desire and necessity, life and death: I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. (ll. 13-16) The chiasmic chiming of “balance,” “breath” and “death,” depend on the word “seemed,” which throws into doubt the reckless heroism of the airman who sees the future as an obliterating “tumult in the clouds” (l. 12). A fatal pause in the triumphant march of the airman’s thoughts, a “lonely impulse of delight” (l. 11), strikes a balance: a life given away or lived—“this life, this death”—is in any case a “waste of breath.” In “Easter 1916,” Yeats establishes a similar ambivalent scene of reckless heroism. In the second stanza, a stately order is achieved in the roll call of artists, writers and educators, all but one dead long before the poem’s publication: “That woman’s days . . . This man . . . This other his helper . . . He might have won fame . . . this other man . . . He had done most bitter wrong . . . He, too . . . He, too.” Something singular, a “drunken, vainglorious” voice, 26 halts and balances this unnamed multitude: 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: A terrible beauty is born. (ll. 33-40) We can easily identify with the “young and beautiful” partisan, the “man [who] kept a school” and “rode our winged horse,” but Yeats wants to call into question just this ease, the lonely but beautiful impulse of the airman who strikes a risky balance with the sky. And so he chooses the lout, who must be included in the song and who is transformed by the revolution to which he has sacrificed himself. Though the poet will again issue a roll call, naming names in the last stanza, he is satisfied at this point to establish the kind of duality he favors in the middle period, the Hic and Ille (this and that) of “Ego Dominus Tuus” (1919): Ille. By the help of an image I call to my own opposite, summon all That I have handled least, least looked upon. Hic. And I would find myself and not an image. Ille. That is our modern home . . . (ll. 8-12) The struggle with balance and opposition, the struggle to conceive of opposition as a form of balance, is evident in poems throughout this period. Strikingly, Yeats calls upon the image to facilitate a balanced opposition, to bring into appearance the force of one’s opposite, one’s anti-self. In “Easter 1916,” we can chart Yeats’s growing awareness that images are themselves a living index of an opposition that is absolutely necessary. Opposites call to each other in the second stanza of “Easter 1916,” the “helper and friend” call to the “daring and sweet” and both call to the “vainglorious lout” (ll. 30, 32). But as if in acknowledgment of his own tendency to romanticize, Yeats focuses the poem’s argument on the lout, “this other man I had dreamed” (l. 31). Like the fisherman, this man who “had done most bitter wrong,” is also an imagined man, and as such must be “numbered in the song”: not only named (as in the final stanza), but counted as a beat in the trimeter line. If there is a symmetry and balance to this stanza, it is not marred by McBride’s dominance in the final lines. He is the dialectical image of what ought to matter most and what is “least looked upon” (“Ego Dominus Tuus,” l. 10)—what is terrible in league with what is beautiful, the friend with the lout. This “casual comedy” is the poet’s “modern home” in the sense that the terrible beauty the Rising inaugurates marks precisely the futurity dreamt of by the ancient bards. The present balances the future on the fulcrum of the past. But Yeats, master dialectician, requires more than balance. As “Airman” and “Fisherman” show, he requires the horseman’s glance, the “cold eye” of rectification, which is to say, he requires error and misprision. Dialectics 27 is, for Yeats, a struggle to see clearly along the lines of sight that he has laid down for himself. His strong visual imagination makes my recourse to Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image—one in which dialectics comes to a standstill—the recognition of a deep affinity between the two men.8 For I think that Yeats eschews the formalist (and formulaic and oppressive) closure of poetic dialectics in favor of something more fluid and, at the same time, more powerfully redemptive. This something brings me to the “living stream” in the third stanza of “Easter 1916,” which presents the reader with a tableau that evokes an organic and incorporative balance. At this point, the poem enacts the sublimity it narrates precisely by upsetting the poem’s formal symmetry, for the third stanza lacks the refrain “a terrible beauty is born” that firmly roots the rest of the poem in a ballad tradition. “Yeats singles out the stanza about nature’s active changingness,” Helen Vendler writes, “as an example of the beautiful, in contrast to the revolutionary sublime of the other three stanzas. . . . [T]he refrainless stanza of change is thereby put outside narrative and into the genre of meditation.” With this last sentiment, I wholly agree, but I would want to reverse the polarity of Vendler’s aesthetics, for I see the revolutionary ballad that unfolds in stanzas one, two and four as a balanced and symmetrical work of beauty, while the third stanza with it its barely controlled excesses, functions as the sublime moment in the poem, the moment when revolution moves toward accommodation. In stanza three, the poet introduces a landscape that accommodates the stone-like reality of “hearts with one purpose alone” and offers the heart so “enchanted” another purpose, a new ground for recognizability “in the midst of all”: 28 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 it; 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. (ll. 45-56) As Calvin Bedient has pointed out, Yeats’s modernism is all about movement.9 However, despite the high drama of the surrounding stanzas, there is little of real motion, only addressing and proclaiming, the murmuring of names: the poetic equivalent of a sculpture garden. The layering of vocations and temperaments, the conjunction of images of change and immobility exemplify “dialectics at a standstill,” which for Benjamin was a way for the past to “shine forth” in the work of the present. In Yeats’s work at this time, heroism is depicted as reckless and violent, but also virtuous in the way that great men and women can afford to be, as the poet indicates in Responsibilities, from 1914, when he writes, “Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun.”11 Hence, in the third stanza we are presented with a world in which violence and movement are assimilated into the environment, where they are natural, even inevitable: the “horse-hoof slides on the brim” of things, amid the diving moor-hens and the moor-cocks calling. The rhythms and repetitions act like the stream, an ambient, elemental force that takes in all of this including the stone, and perforce, the enchanted heart. Metaphor and reality coalesce in a process that produces a new dialectical image of “minute by minute” change, the slipping, sliding and plashing of natural existence that Yeats, in a fit of pessimism, would later call “frog-spawn.”12 But there is nothing pessimistic about this stanza, which, as Vendler hints, is a lovely meditation on non-violent inclusiveness. Taken as an entr’acte, however, we can see the third stanza as the point at which the poet’s image of a “casual comedy” is countered by an image of a stone’s resilience. It allows for the poem’s transition to a new stance, one of ethical and political skepticism about the value of reckless heroism, of the willingness to strike a balance with death on one’s own terms. The third stanza thus serves a vital structural as well as symbolic purpose. The image formed of rider, horse, hens and cocks, the stone “in the midst of all” ennobles the granite certainties and sacrifices that are inevitable in revolutionary times. The poet is right to leave to Heaven the pressing question, “O when may it suffice?” (l. 59). For if, as Michael Wood argues, “[s]acrifice can be measured” and “there can be too much of it,” then what is at issue is a proper level of restraint, for the question itself “clearly denies the infinite attraction of the old hard service which delighted in the excesses of renunciation.”13 The poet transforms this excess into the poem’s promise, which is also a responsibility to “murmur name upon name, / As a mother names her child” (ll. 61-2). Like the “living stream” that accommodates the stone, the poet who names brings everyone—friend and lout, mother and child—into “the midst of all.” In this respect, the third stanza of “Easter 1916,” is an enigmatic conjunction rather than a non-sequitur and looks forward to “The Tower,” specifically to a strange transitional image of nesting. The opening section of Part III is a testamentary moment that is both a declaration of faith and a mockery of idealism, humanity’s “superhuman, / Mirror-resembling dream” (ll. 164-5). Before Yeats can return to the idea of the “upstanding men” who will carry on his legacy, he points to a queer opening: As at the loophole there The daws chatter and scream, And drop twigs layer upon layer. When they have mounted up, The mother bird will rest On their hollow top, And so warm her wild nest. (ll. 166-72) The testamentary and summative dynamics of this complex mid-period poem are usurped by a homely natural image, like the “stare’s nest” that erupts in “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” The movement from “Mirror-resembling dream” to a daw “warm[ing] her wild nest” results in a dialectical image of chattering, dropping, mounting, warming, resting, resisting life. Suspended in the boughs of the poem, the image of the daw’s nest precariously knits together the totality of the poem’s imagined world, just as the poet founds the “upstanding 29 men” of the future on his own artistic pride: “I declare / They shall inherit my pride” (ll. 126-7). Having passed through the loophole, the poet makes an appeal to a future that will not belong to him: When the swan must fix his eye Upon a fading gleam, Float out upon a long Last reach of glittering stream And there sing his last song. (ll. 140-44) The poet is like the swan fixing his eye on the “fading gleam” of coming times, ready to declare his faith in such a way that constructs the poem as an invitation, an opening to the future, even (perhaps especially) “When all streams are dry” (l. 138). Like the fisherman imagined by the poet, whose “flies drop in the stream,” or the “upstanding men / That climb the streams until / The fountain leap” (ll. 122-4), the poet looks to turbulent waters and sees futurity in their turbulence. The repetition of images of running or “darkening” water that surrounds obstacles or annihilates them provides an index of the poet’s changing ideas about the role of poetry in times of violence and social disorder. Poetry is both the stream and what stands amid its powerful forces: “the stone in the midst of all.” Always sensitive to the status of images, Yeats finds especially valuable those images that function dialectically, that redeem the past by including it, by accommodating rather than resolving the tensions arising from it. In “Easter 1916,” however, this accommodation is tempered by more questions, the kind of political questions that bedeviled Yeats and continue to bedevil Ireland to the present day: does nationalism only ever lead to “needless death”? 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; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? (ll. 65-73) These questions come from the co-author (with Lady Augusta Gregory) of Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), a play that romanticized sacrifice for the idea of a Sovereign Irish nation: “there were a great many in the west, some that died hundreds of years ago, and there are some that will die tomorrow.” Allegiance to the Old Woman in that play (an ancient Irish Sovereignty figure) requires total sacrifice: “If any one would give me help he must give me himself, he must give me all.”14 Barely fifteen years later, Yeats poses serious questions about this mode of sacrificial heroism, which can be seductive and even life-affirming (as we see in “Airman”), but which comes, for the poet, to feel like a needless, perhaps a hopeless, desire for balance, a desire mocked in the poet’s finely-turned judgment: “they dreamed and are dead.” 30 The mid-career works I’ve been alluding to have turned a corrective gaze on the poet’s canon and returned to those moments when the poet fails to recognize his own poetic creations, moments of bewilderment caused by an excess of the same love that motivates his heroes: the desire for that exquisite, that terrible balance, “now and in time to be.” He finds that balance now in a recitation of proper names: 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. (ll. 74-80) By supplying the names of the leaders of the Rising in neat trimeter lines, the poet accommodates them not only to the rhythms of his poem—“I write it out in a verse”—but also to the image of an inclusive and tolerant future promoted by the “living stream.” The loftiest, the dreamiest, the most just, and the lout—these four create a rhythm of their own, the beating of a heart that, if one is not careful, can be made into stone. But another equally implicit message is conveyed: what is made can be unmade, or even better, remade. This is the promise of the last stanza, that the “excess of love” and the bewilderment will be ratified if not resolved. On this view, these four men stand for all the “vivid faces,” all the murmuring actors who have played their part in the comedy. These four, the apostles of a new nation, of a terrible beauty, recast the traditions of heroism that the young Yeats learned from O’Grady, Lady Gregory and John O’Leary. But in the very process that gives them a name, the poet’s heroes have been de-idealized, their romantic heroism sublimated into a murmurous repetition—like the mother naming her child, the poet assuages his own scarcely veiled bewilderment by asking questions meant for these heroes, who “[a]re changed, changed utterly.” This is no longer a “casual comedy” but a memorial in which sacrificed heroes find their eternal fame “now and in time to be.” “Easter 1916” is an elegy for those who sacrificed their lives in the Rising. But it is also a prophecy, which springs from the third stanza, for in that brief moment at the stony heart of the poem, the poet seems to address us, one hundred years on, as we contemplate the motley crew that dominates our own “casual comedy.” This poem is a prophecy in a sneaky lyrical way, the same way that Yeats’s “Second Coming” (also published in Michael Robartes and the Dancer) is, in a sneaky lyrical way, about origins: “Easter 1916” memorializes the dead but is in fact asking questions of those who will read it in coming times; “Second Coming,” in one striking image after another—“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” (ll. 14-15)—conjures a terrifying future, but the same images lead us to think mostly about the primeval beginnings of whatever slouches toward Bethlehem. Both poems use rhythm and repetition, and layers of misprision, to call into play a temporality that moves counter to the poem’s temperament. In “Easter 1916,” which is cast in a jaunty trimeter rhythm, Yeats commemorates “Romantic Ireland” once again, but this time he cannot say that it is dead and gone, for it reverberates in all the murmuring voices that will continue to utter the names of those sacrificed to revolution. All he can wonder, along that bouncy triple beat, is whether that sacrifice was needless, whether those who sacrificed 31 themselves were bewildered. The “terrible beauty” is the awful future of uncertainty that comes from radical change and from a stony heart. It also comes from letting that heart’s stoniness accommodate “all” that surrounds it. It comes even from breaking the stone, which is arguably Yeats’s job in writing the poem, particularly in asking the questions he asks, which are directed at coming times, not those in the past he commemorates nor those in the present (the now of 1916), who might not feel consoled by his skeptical elegy. They are directed at those to whom the poem issues its promise, those people, like us today, who keep insisting that it all won’t happen again, who confuse what is necessary with what will suffice. 1. W. B. Yeats, 7KH3RHPV ed. Richard J. Finneran, vol. 1, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1983, 1989), XX. All quotations from Yeats poetry are drawn from this volume.  <HDWVZRUNHGRQWKHSRHPLQWKHSHULRG0D\6HSWHPEHULWZDVÀUVWLVVXHGLQDSULYDWHSULQWLQJRI copies by Clement Shorter, in August 1917. It appeared in October 23, 1920, in The 1HZ6WDWHVPDQ and The Dial published it in November 1920. 0LFKDHO5REDUWHVDQGWKH'DQFHU was published the following year, which marks the poem’s entry into Yeats’s canon. 3. Paul de Man argues that a poem like Yeats’s “Among School Children,” which ends with a dramatic question—“O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the  GDQFH"µ³FDQEHUHDGLQWZRYHU\GLIIHUHQWZD\V$FFRUGLQJWR'H0DQUHIHUULQJWRWKHÀQDOTXHVWLRQ  “two entirely coherent but entirely incompatible readings can be made to hinge on one line, whose grammatical structure is devoid of ambiguity, but whose rhetorical mode turns the mood as well as the mode of the entire poem upside down” (“Rhetoric and Semiology,” in $OOHJRULHVRI5HDGLQJ)LJXUDO/DQJXDJHLQ   5RXVVHDX1LHW]VFKH5LONHDQG3URXVW (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 12. 4. Benjamin, The Arcades Project,WUDQV+RZDUG(LODQGDQG.HYLQ0F/DXJKOLQ &DPEULGJH0$DQG/RQGRQ Belknap Press, 1999), N3, 1. On the dialectical image see 458, 473ff. 5. See Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben,” the concluding stanza with the poet’s epitaph: On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by! (ll. 90-4) 6. It is worth noting, that in terms of Yeats’s oeuvre, “Easter 1916,” which appears in 0LFKDHO5REDUWHVDQG  the Dancer (1921), comes after “The Fisherman,” which appears in The Wild Swans of Coole (1919), a volume  WKDWPDUNVWKHEHJLQQLQJRI<HDWV·V$QJOR,ULVK5HYLYDO7DNHQWRJHWKHUWKHVHWZRYROXPHVIXOO\H[SORUHWKH  GLDOHFWLFDOFRPSOH[LWLHVWKDWDUHVRWLJKWO\FRPSRXQGHGLQWKHIRXUVWDQ]DVRI´µ 7. Yeats’s early admiration for Standish O’Grady’s History of Ireland and the Revival historicism that sought historical knowledge in bardic literature stands behind this aesthetic standpoint on revolution and the idea of the postcolonial Nation.  )RU%HQMDPLQWKHGLDOHFWLFDOLPDJHHPHUJHVZKHQ´ZKDWKDVEHHQFRPHVWRJHWKHULQDÁDVKZLWKWKHQRZ [“now time,” -HW]W]HLW] to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill” (The Arcades Project,WUDQV+RZDUG(LODQGDQG.HYLQ0F/DXJKOLQ &DPEULGJH0$DQG/RQGRQ%HONQDS3UHVV 1999, 463. 9. Vender, Helen. 2XU6HFUHW'LVFLSOLQH<HDWVDQG/\ULF)RUP(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 20. 10. See Calvin Bedient, 7KH<HDWV%URWKHUVDQG0RGHUQLVP·V/RYHRI0RWLRQ(South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 11. 5HVSRQVLELOLWLHVZDVÀUVWSXEOLVKHGLQD&XDOD3UHVVHGLWLRQLQ0DFPLOODQEURXJKWLWRXWLQ1HZ<RUN  and London in1916. 12. See “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” in The Winding Stair (1929): I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch, A blind man battering blind men. (ll. 57-60) 13. Michael Wood, Yeats and Violence 2[IRUG2[IRUG8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV  14. W. B. Yeats and Lady August Gregory, &DWKOHHQ1L+RXOLKDQ in The Plays, eds. David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark vol. 2 of The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats (New York: Scribner, 1989), 90. 32 Gregory Castle Bio Gregory Castle is a professor of English and Irish Literature at Arizona State University. He writes on Irish Revival, modernism, the novel and literary theory. His books include Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge UP), Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (UP Florida), Literary Theory Handbook (Wiley-Blackwell); he has edited A History of the Modernist Novel (Cambridge UP) and (with Patrick Bixby) Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain: A Critical Edition (Syracuse UP); he is currently editing, also with Patrick Bixby, A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge UP). At present, he is writing mainly on Joyce, Yeats and the Irish Revival. 33