A Terrible Beauty Is Born
“And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn…
A terrible beauty is born.”
So William Butler Yeats ended his great poem “Easter 1916”. I took the title of An Excess of Love from this poem because it seemed to me the only accurate way to describe the high passion that inspired a handful of Irishmen to take on the mighty British Empire in the doomed Rebellion of Easter 1916. It certainly couldn’t have been an excess of common sense that inspired them! Of the fourteen men executed by the British as leaders of that rebellion, five were poets – that fact alone may give you some insight into the idealism of that time.
Now we live in an age in which revolutions are fomented by skilled political
strategists: when terrorists who end up in Paris or New York or Brussels might have prepared for their missions in Isil’s training camps.
Ireland. Easter. 1916.
Life was far simpler in 1916 – idealists struggled against injustice. Seven hundred years of British colonial rule, two potato famines and a hundred years of penal laws which had forbidden the Irish to own land, to speak their own language or to have access to their own courts had made life intolerable enough for men to be willing to fight back.
Ambrose Pierce once wrote that
“History is an account
Mostly false
Of events
Mostly unimportant
Which are brought about
By rulers
Mostly knaves
and soldiers
Mostly fools.”
Before I had done a year’s research into the history of the Easter Rebellion and all that went before it, I knew he’d left out perhaps the most important fact about history – that sometimes, as in the Irish Easter Rising of 1916, history is written in the heart’s blood of idealists and heroic dreamers who are willing to lay down their lives for a concept called freedom.
And sometimes that’s enough to change the world.
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