Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
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?
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.

Basic Set Up

This bad boy is the last stanza of William Butler Yeats' poem "Easter, 1916." It talks pretty much directly (not a whole lot of nuance here) about the Easter Uprising, a rebellion against English rule in Ireland. It was published the same year that The Republic of Ireland gained independence from Britain.

You asked for revolution? Here you go, Shmoopers: a poem devoted to the Easter Uprising (sometimes also called the Easter Rising) of 1916. This particular Easter was way more than just colored eggs and Peeps.

On Easter Monday, a group of more than a thousand Irish Nationalists—people who wanted independence for Ireland, which was at that time a British kingdom—held a bunch of different important buildings are Dublin, including the post office and declared Ireland a Republic. They even had a Proclamation of The Republic to read.

Things didn't exactly go as planned. Violence ensued, killing almost two hundred people and wounding more… and Ireland didn't secure its freedom. But the Easter Uprising set in motion events that would lead to the formation of the Republic of Ireland. In other words, it was a pretty freaking big deal.

Yeats wasn't super into the whole Easter Uprising thing—he was more into being a posh intellectual than a revolutionary (maybe because his great love rejected him in favor of one of those hawt revolutionary guys) —but by the end of this poem he gives props to the history-making deeds of the guys who orchestrated the Easter Uprising, even as he condemns the brutality and violence of the rebellion.

Okay, so we cut out the bits where W.B. Yeats is getting a little down on the events of Easter, 1916 and left you with the go, Irish Republic, go! passage. But that's because W.B. seemed to have a change of heart by the end of the poem and is favor of his countrymen wanting to have, well, their own country to be men in.

He still stays a tad ambivalent, though: he concedes that, "we know (the revolutionaries') dream" but that "they dreamed and are dead," which is a little harsh. He's essentially saying that all they have to show of their dream is death. Or, in other words, a big fat goose egg. In fact, he calls them delusional, or "bewildered," as a result of their dream. Ouch.

But then he goes on to name a bunch of guys that were influential in the Easter Uprising: "MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly and Pearse," and says that "wherever green is worn," they'll be remembered. They have changed from being just dudes to being symbolic, as important to Irish identity as the national color: green.

And that last line, the "terrible beauty" part? That's how a reticent, snobby guy like W.B. acknowledges that the Easter Uprising was important. He's not saying it was the best event since the invention of sliced bread, but he's come a ways from saying that all that was left as result of Easter, 1916 was death n' destruction.

Welcome to Modernism, y'all, where the closest you come to commemorating the start of a revolution is to say, "Yeah, it was okay… but it was also bad."