English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

This essay examines “Easter 1916,” by William Butler Yeats, focusing on the four questions near the end of the poem. It will argue that the original open grammatical structure of the questions has been closed off by the context, and critical reception, of the poem, and that they are now seen as largely rhetorical. This discussion will revisit this poem, from a presentist hermeneutic perspective, which will read these as real questions, and will then suggest how the rhetorical strategies used by Yeats in the poem have served as  exempla  for significant attitudes of mind in the new state, attitudes that still resonate in the Ireland of today. It will suggest that Yeats’s poem, far from being a verbal or aesthetic commemoration of the 1916 Rising, in fact offers a form of critique, one which has long-term resonances for the Irish public sphere. Looking at the rhetorical trope of  aposiopesis  (a “breaking off” or “breaking away” from providing an answer to a question), as the defining trope of the poem, it will be argued that this trope has become a defining way of remembering the rising, and of dealing with its presentist ramifications in the social and political realm.

Rereading the Rising: towards an understanding of the influence of “Easter 1916” on contemporary Ireland