Context
This poem was written as a reaction to the Easter Rising of 23-29 April 1916.
It was written in September 1916 when Yeats was staying with Maud Gonne MacBride at Les Mouettes, Calvados. In it he records his reactions to the Easter Rising in Dublin, when the city centre was occupied by a force of around 700 members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, led by Patrick Pearse, and members of the Citizen Army, led by James Connolly. They held out for 6 days – 15 of their leaders were sentenced by courts martial and executed between 3rd and 12th May. Yeats felt that the work of years – bringing together of different classes, the freeing of Irish literature from politics – had been overturned by the violence and he was ‘very despondent about the future.’
Structure
The poem has 4 stanzas, of varying lengths. This suggests a freedom on the part of Yeats in that he is not as rigid and controlled here as he usually is. This may be a reflection of the subject matter. There is a regular ABAB rhyme scheme, using both iambic tetrameter and iambic trimester.
Stanza 1
The word ‘them’ refers to the Irish revolutionaries or rebels to be. Yeats addresses the poem directly to the participants in the Easter Rising. The phrase ‘vivid faces’ shows that they are recognisable or striking in some way; in other words not ordinary.
The...
