MacBride’s martyrdom ended Yeats’s dreams

WB Yeats’s iconic poem Easter 1916 will feature widely during this centenary year.

It is a many-layered work, but is, essentially, a love poem to Maud Gonne, whom the poet still hoped to capture. Maud rejected the poem in a famous letter to Yeats, writing: “No, I don’t like your poem, it isn’t worthy of you and above all it isn’t worthy of your subject.”

She objects to the line ‘too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart’, which references the Rising, but also herself.