Easter, 1916 Sacrifice Quotes

For Yeats, sacrifice can be a good thing. But too much of it can make a person's heart turn to stone. After all, there's only so much death you can handle before you start to care a little less.

Here, Yeats says something that would have been on the minds of many Irish people, although it wasn't something you wanted to say out loud. It turns out that Ireland was going to get its independence either way after World War I; so all of the death and sacrifice of the Easter Uprising might have actually been pointless.

By the end of the poem, Yeats admits that whenever people were green (Ireland's official color) in the future, they will be connected to the people who died in the Easter Uprising. It's pretty much the nicest thing Yeats can say about the fighters' sacrifice without actually saying he admires them in any way.