Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?---------(Suffice: be enough)
That is Heaven's part, our part (God's job to stop the fighting)
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come (Sleep another way of saying death)
On limbs that had run wild (That once was alive)
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it a 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 (love for Ireland)
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse-
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Conolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn, (Color for Ireland)
Are changed, changed utterly: (Lines are once again repeated from stanza 1 and 2)
A terrible beauty is born.
- Words with same highlights rhyme
- Certain people stated as referred to from stanza 2
- Places
- Underlined means the word is repeated
This last stanza of the poem "Easter 1916", William Butler Yeats is basically trying to say, is everything worth the outcome to make today today? When will all the deaths be enough, now that the people that once were living are dead. Forever they will be dead. The last two lines have been repeated throughout the poem and I think that the "terrible beauty" is the people who started everything, the revolutionaries. And "changed utterly" refers to Ireland never being the same again.
