Within months of the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Sinn Féin began planning an armed uprising against the British for the establishment of an Irish Republic. By early 1916 the leaders decided to launch the fighting at Easter. Despite a disjointed start and orders outside Dublin being countermanded by Eoin MacNeill, on Easter Monday, April 24, approximately 1,200 Volunteers began to capture key buildings and sites in Dublin and in other locations in southern Ireland. The General Post Office became the rebels’ headquarters. Padraic Pearse, as commandant-in-chief of the rebel forces, stood on the steps of the Post Office and read the hastily printed Proclamation of the Irish Republic, copies of which were posted in central Dublin and handed out to the crowd. The British were taken by surprise and needed several days to organize a full response and obtain reinforcements. But as the Irish contingent failed to capture some of the key transportation and communication centers in Dublin, the British were able to maintain control of the wider city and by Wednesday started shelling rebel-held positions. Despite fierce resistance, Pearse announced the surrender of the Irish forces on Saturday, April 29. Close to 500 people were killed in the rebellion, of whom about half were civilians, and another 2,600 people were wounded. After impromptu secret trials, British authorities executed fourteen leaders of the Rising between May 3 and May 12, including all seven signers of the Proclamation. The conscience of the world was shocked by these rapid executions, and many Irish who had been willing to accept some form of union with Britain became radicalized by the heavy-handed British reprisals.
The Proclamation of the Irish Republic. “Poblacht na hEireann / The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland.”Dublin: Printed by the Gaelic Press on the anniversary of the Easter Rising, 1917.
The Proclamation of the Irish Republic is the foundation document of the Irish Free State. Written primarily by Padraic Pearse, the first printing was read aloud by him from the steps of the General Post Office, O’Connell Street, Dublin, on Easter Monday, 1916. All seven signatories were executed by the British authorities for their roles in the rebellion, their deaths serving to animate both Irish and international sentiment against Britain. This exceedingly rare 1917 printing was initiated by Helena Molony and the women’s nationalist movement Cumann na mBan to mark the first anniversary of the Rising during tense times before the War of Independence. Posted across Dublin using jam pots of glue, most copies were quickly torn down by the police, including one posted atop Liberty Hall a few weeks later. It took a squadron of police to break through a barricade to get onto the roof, but the poster survived for hours with hundreds of Dubliners looking on.
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
This portrait of Pearse, characteristically in profile to hide a lazy left eye, was taken during his trip to New York City to raise funds for St. Enda’s School and the Irish Volunteers.
W. B. Yeats.Easter, 1916.London: Privately printed by Clement Shorter, 1917.
Yeats drafted “Easter, 1916” in France that summer, finalized the poem at Coole Park in September, and briefly considered making it the opening of his next collection, The Wild Swans at Coole. In the volatile political climate, however, he deemed this unwise. Sending a typescript to Clement Shorter in early 1917, he urged him to be “very careful” with it: “Lady Gregory asked me not to send it [to] you until we had finished our dispute with the [British] authorities about the Lane pictures. She was afraid of it getting about & damaging us & she is not timid.” Yeats allowed Shorter to print just twenty-five copies of the poem in this rare edition, but he carefully restricted distribution of these to friends who would not circulate them further.
Manuscript draft by W. B. Yeats, 1916, written in the end papers of Lady Gregory’s copy of The Collected Works in Verse and Prose of William Butler Yeats, vol. 3.Easter, 1916.Stratford-on-Avon: Imprinted at the Shakespeare Head Press, 1908.
Yeats finally sanctioned open publication of “Easter, 1916” in November 1920 at the height of the Irish War of Independence. Much of the poem’s force derives from its taut uncertainty about the “terrible beauty” the Rising had birthed. In this fair copy of the final stanza, inscribed on the fly-leaf of a volume of his Collected Works, Yeats wonders about the appropriate limits of nationalist fervor—can “excess of love” be justified if it leads to direct violence?—and about what part writers such as himself could now play in Ireland. His ballad-like ending asserts that the executed leaders—“MacDonagh and MacBride / Connolly and Pearse”—are now “changed utterly” and to be remembered forever.
Autograph letter signed by W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, April 27, 1916.
Yeats was in London when the Rising began, having spent only about a week in Dublin over the preceding year. As events unfolded, he relied significantly on reports sent from Ireland by his sister Lily and by Lady Gregory. In this letter, his first surviving mention of the rebellion, he regrets “a tragic business that will leave Ireland different for a long time & affect our work a good deal.” Recognizing that the Rising would have significant consequences for the Abbey Theatre and for his own and Gregory’s creative work, he does not as yet envisage the “tragic business” as transformative. Over the following two weeks his references to the conflict express deep uncertainty about how to respond: “the whole thing bewilders me.”
Autograph letter signed by Lady Gregory to W. B. Yeats.Coole Park, May 13, 1916.
Once she began to find out more about what had happened during the conflict, Gregory’s viewpoint shifted, with her recoil from the “terror” of disorder and violence outweighed by her recognition of the transformative effects of the Rising. She was quick to appreciate the extent to which the direct action of its leaders indicted her own and Yeats’s literary and cultural incrementalism: “Beside them we seem a little insincere, we have all given in to compromise.” Here she tells Yeats, “my mind is filled with sorrow at the Dublin tragedy” and that she has begun to write “some words of sympathy with—or sorrow for—those who [have] been executed.”
Lady Gregory.“What Was Their Utopia?” May 16, 1916.
Typescript draft.
After Gregory completed this essay on May 16, 1916, she sent it to Yeats. She begins by anxiously wondering whether the Rising’s leaders had given to their plans the “intensity of thought” needed to discipline strong feeling into coherent principles. If not, their action might be merely utopian. But she answers that question with an emphatic conviction that, through their vision and decisive self-sacrifice, they were unquestionably poets. The essay remained unpublished until 2016. Along with her letters to Yeats—which he acknowledged were of “historical importance”—it was a contributing influence toward his as-yet unwritten poem “Easter, 1916.”
This unique handmade and poignant compilation consists of over 140 pages of newspaper clippings, including photos of all the leaders of the Rising with their execution dates, handwritten poems and songs, as well as a half dozen different handwritten and newspaper printings of poems titled “Easter 1916.”
The Sinn Fein Rebellion, 1916. Dublin After the Six Days‘ Insurrection.Dublin: Mecredy, 1916.
Souvenir photo album.
In the weeks and months after the Easter Rising, souvenir booklets, postcards, and memorabilia were printed to take advantage of public interest in the rebellion. In so doing, the myth of the rebel leaders as martyrs began to take shape, turning public opinion further against the British.
Thomas MacDonagh.April and May.Dublin: Sealey Bryhers & Walker, 1902.
Thomas MacDonagh was executed on May 3, 1916, as a commandant in the Rising. This volume of his poetry was inscribed by twenty-four Republican prisoners, many sentenced to death for their roles in the rebellion, but whose sentences were commuted. They include Éamon de Valera, who later became Taoiseach; Constance Markiewicz, who became the first woman elected to the Westminster Parliament; Eoin MacNeill, chief-of-staff of the Irish Volunteers; and Thomas Ashe, founding member of the Irish Volunteers. Most signatories have added their prisoner numbers. This book was likely inscribed following their release from jail in the amnesty of June 1917.
Released Irish prisoners, Mansion House, Dublin.October, 1917.
Vintage Photograph.
In June 1917 the British government released more than one hundred Irish prisoners who participated in the Easter rebellion. This photo was taken at a convention held in Dublin’s Mansion House, October 1917, that unified Sinn Féin (Irish for “ourselves alone”) and established former prisoner Éamon de Valera as its leader.The location of Easter Rising rebel Con O’Donovan has been marked. Eoin MacNeill, founder of the Irish Volunteers, can be seen beside de Valera.
Farewell Letter of P. H. Pearse.Limerick: M. Fitzpatrick, Printer, 99 O’Connell Street, [1916].
“Written to his Mother a few hours before he was Shot in Kilmainham Jail in Connection with the Irish Insurrection, April, 1916.”
These flyers, printed soon after the execution of the leaders of the Irish rebellion, were used as propaganda for the nationalist cause. Pearse, a school teacher, writes in his final letter, “This is the death I should have asked for… to die a soldier’s death for Ireland and Freedom.”
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
At the time of the Easter Rising, part-time actor Sean Connolly was starring in a play at the Abbey Theatre called Under Which Flag, written by rebel leader and fellow socialist James Connolly. The play employed a green flag as a prop and Connolly, as a captain for the Irish Citizen Army, took the flag from the theater and tried to plant it on the roof of Dublin’s City Hall. He was shot by a sniper’s bullet, the first Irish combatant killed during the rebellion.
