Yeats’s Easter 1916 – and why Maud Gonne was not impressed
WB Yeats’s iconic poem ‘Easter 1916’ will feature widely during this centenary year of the Easter Rising.
She objects to the line “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart” in reference to the Rising, but also to herself. Scholars have concentrated on this metaphor, but omit the other plainly stated reason she rejected the poem further along in her letter. Maud had sought a rapprochement with her husband John MacBride in 1910 but was rebuffed. After his execution, there was no obstacle, though Yeats’s unwelcome poem stirs the old feud.
She tells him, and posterity: “As for my husband he has entered Eternity by the great door of sacrifice which Christ opened & has therefore atoned for all so that in praying for him I can also ask for his prayers & ‘a terrible beauty is born’.” Maud herself may well have been atoning for all to her late husband, John MacBride, in this remarkable sentence.
Anthony J Jordan
Years was a loathsome creature, but just as two ugly parents can spawn exquisitely beautiful children ‘Easter 1916’ has transcended the author’s cynical intent and immortalised its subject “now and forever, wherever green is worn”.