“But I, being poor, have only my dreams”: POETRY AND THE WORKER
Yeats’ ‘Easter 1916’ poem addresses the rising, and it vacillates between admiration for the rebels and criticism of Britain’s response, in particular reckoning that everything now is different: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born”. Note the oxymoron: Yeats writes in another poem “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone”. He thus questions whether the deaths were needless, as England might have granted Ireland its freedom without the rebellion.
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