Rereading the Rising: towards an understanding of the influence of “Easter 1916” on contemporary Ireland

ABSTRACT

This essay examines “Easter 1916,” by William Butler Yeats, focusing on the four questions near the end of the poem. It will argue that the original open grammatical structure of the questions has been closed off by the context, and critical reception, of the poem, and that they are now seen as largely rhetorical. This discussion will revisit this poem, from a presentist hermeneutic perspective, which will read these as real questions, and will then suggest how the rhetorical strategies used by Yeats in the poem have served as exempla for significant attitudes of mind in the new state, attitudes that still resonate in the Ireland of today. It will suggest that Yeats’s poem, far from being a verbal or aesthetic commemoration of the 1916 Rising, in fact offers a form of critique, one which has long-term resonances for the Irish public sphere. Looking at the rhetorical trope of aposiopesis (a “breaking off” or “breaking away” from providing an answer to a question), as the defining trope of the poem, it will be argued that this trope has become a defining way of remembering the rising, and of dealing with its presentist ramifications in the social and political realm.

KEYWORDS:

• Yeats’ Easter 1916
• memory
• aposiopesis
• rhetoric
• grammar
• politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Shklovsky and Sher, Theory of Prose.

2. Yeats, Collected Poems, 181.

3. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 6.

4. Ibid., 62.

5. Ibid., 57.

6. Ibid., 20.

7. Vendler, “The Later Poetry,” 79.

8. Ibid., 80.

9. Yeats, Collected Poems, 180–1.

10. Ibid., 181.

11. Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present, 22.

12. Grady, Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics, 236.

13. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, 368.

14. Kee, The Green Flag. Vol. 2, The Bold Fenian Men, 255.

15. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, 33.

16. Ibid., 374; 379.

17. Ross, W. B. Yeats, 458.

18. Yeats, Collected Poems, 179.

19. Ibid., 179–80.

20. Ibid., 179.

21. Ibid., 103.

22. Ibid., 179.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 180.

25. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, 66.

26. Halbwachs and Coser, On Collective Memory, 33.

27. Casey, Remembering, 216–7.

28. Ibid., 226.

29. Ibid., 25.

30. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 256.

31. Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur: Owl of Minerva, 30.

32. Yeats, Collected Poems, 181.

33. Bell, Yeats and the Logic of Formalism, 53.

34. Heidegger, Being and Time, 301.

35. Benjamin, One-Way street, and Other Writings, 362.

36. Heidegger, Being and Time, 347.

37. Heaney, Preoccupations, 56.

38. Oser, The Ethics of Modernism, 65.

39. Melchiori, The Whole Mystery of Art, 63–64.

40. Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 255–6.

41. Nally, Envisioning Ireland, 190.

42. Kain, Dublin in the age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce, 127–8.

43. Harper, Wisdom of Two, 215.

44. Ibid., 237.

45. Ross, W. B. Yeats, 60.

46. Myers, “The Easter Rising did as much damage to culture as it did to the GPO,” 17.

47. Brooks and Woloch, Whose Freud? 4.

48. O’Donoghue, “Yeats and the Drama,” 109.

49. Grene, Yeats’s Poetic Codes, 5.

50. Wade, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, 613.

51. Yeats, Collected Poems, 180.

52. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life: The Arch-Poet, 62.

53. White and Jeffares, Always Your Friend, 384.

54. Yeats, Collected Poems, 180.

55. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life: The Arch-Poet, 63.

56. Yeats, Collected Poems, 356.

57. Longenbach, Stone Cottage, 256.

58. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, 820.

59. Wade, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, 613.

60. Yeats, Autobiographies, 234.

61. Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 217.

62. Kenner, A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers, 226.

63. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life: The Arch-Poet, 64.

64. Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 57.

65. Yeats, Collected Poems, 180.

66. Ibid., 180.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid.

71. Freud, The Case of Schreber, 145–56.

72. Ibid., 150.

73. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 7.

74. Ibid., 16.

75. Howes, “Yeats and the Postcolonial,” 214.

76. Yeats, Collected Poems, 181.

77. Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, 170.

78. Yeats, Collected Poems, 181.

79. Ibid., 181.

80. Freud, The Case of Schreber, 151.

81. Eagleton, Crazy John and the Bishop, 276.