All Changed, Changed Utterly

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.

So begins William Butler Yeats’s “Easter, 1916,” the most complex, ambivalent, and enthralling political poem of the twentieth century. But Yeats was not among the rebels and republicans in Dublin when he wrote it; he had not in fact “met them at close of day” for some time. When he heard the news of the Easter Rising, he was at a friend’s cabin in the Cotswolds, and he soon returned to his home at 5 Woburn Walk in Bloomsbury, where he had been living since 1895. He made periodic trips to the capital to manage the affairs of the Abbey Theatre, which he had co-founded, but if he found any inspiration in Ireland he found it in the woods and streams of Coole in the far west, where he spent his summers, and not in the cramped, petty world of Dublin literature and politics. He was fifty years old and largely disillusioned with his youthful nationalism. “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone / It’s with O’Leary in the grave,” he had spat in a poem written three years earlier.