![]() ![]() Line 40: After talking about a bunch of people who died in the Easter Uprising (or were executed later), Yeats repeats the phrase, "A terrible beauty is born." Again, it's kind of hard to tell what's so beautiful about all these people dying. ![]() But at this point, we're still not sure what Yeats finds particularly beautiful about this. But in lines 15 and 16, he says that everything is suddenly "changed, changed utterly" and that "A terrible beauty is born." People who understand the reference to the Easter Uprising in the poem's title no doubt understand how everyday life would have changed when the fighting started. Lines 15-16: So far, Yeats has been going on about how he doesn't really care about his run-ins with the common folk of Dublin.The phrase "terrible beauty" seems to be Yeats's way of saying that history's most celebrated moments are usually moments of death. On the other hand, a whole bunch of people died. On the one hand, the Uprising is beautiful because it'll go down in history as a great fight for Irish freedom. ![]() ![]() Whenever he talks about terrible beauty, Yeats seems to be trying to bring together the different (even contradictory) emotions he feels when he thinks about the Irish Uprising of Easter, 1916. Three times in the poem, Yeats ends a stanza with the phrase, "A terrible beauty is born." He even ends the poem with it, which should set off our spidey sense and tell us that it's probably an important phrase. ![]()
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