Easter Morn' Gets Personal

A little suprise this Easter morning when I woke before sunrise with Easter thoughts, not of bunnies or chocolate or resurrection, but of “revolution.”

Must be the Freyne genes, eh?

Thank you, Uncle Peter. I won’t forget you. Even though I never met you, you’ve always been there when I needed the courage to do what had to be done. Know what I mean?

And thank you, William Butler Yeats, for the following:

Easter 1916

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.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.