Easter, 1916 Admiration Quotes

In stanza 3 of the poem, Yeats compares the passion and courage of the Irish fighters to a stone that sits unchanging at the bottom of a flowing stream. There's definitely some admiration here, if only because Yeats knows that he personally doesn't show this kind of consistency in his own life. He tends to go with the flow like most people.

Toward the end of the poem, Yeats still can't commit to full-blown admiration for the Irish fighters. But one thing's for sure: he just wrote a poem about them. This is kind of weird, because Yeats is looking back on his poem and wondering why he just wrote it. Now that's ambivalence for you.