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“All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.”

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The Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin was a key moment in Irish history: after the rising, English forces rounded up and shot at dawn 15 key nationalist leaders who had been involved, including some much-admired household names such as those mentioned near the end of the poem. I believe it is said that before this moment there was not widespread militant support-in-action for the Irish independence movement - not enough to make a difference - but, as this poem records, sometimes history can change in a single day: the killings had the opposite effect to what the English government had presumably desired, since it appears that these martyrs horrified a nation into action, and so within less than a decade. . . Well, there was a civil war, and there were those who were pleased with what was gained and those who were not, and brother turned horrifically upon brother as occurs in civil wars. . . But in retrospect one essential result can't be denied, which it seems the Easter rising martyrs were instrumental in triggering: most of Ireland (26 out of the current 32 counties) became an independent country for the first time in over 700 years of British military occupation. To me, this historic background serves to increase the weight of what are already a moving series of verses below on the subject of collective transformation, of people coming together when moved by a common cause. – Simon Rees, March 2007

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Easter, 1916

W B Yeats


I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
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:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
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.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
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.

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.

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© Copyright 2007 Simon Rees, Kevin Eakins and SYY Integrated Health Systems, Ltd.

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