[Untitled]

No. 18 of 25 copies privately printed by Clement Shorter for distribution among his friends.

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

W.B. Yeats. Sept. 25, 1916

The Rising in Dublin and Proclamation of the Irish Republic took place on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, and between May 3 and 9, Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, John MacBride, Thomas Clarke and other of the leaders were executed. On 11 May, 1916, Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory from London, where he was then living: "The Dublin tragedy has been a great sorrow and anxiety . . . I am trying to write a poem on the men executed--'terrible beauty has been born again' . . . I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me--and I am very despondent about the future." The poem is dated 25 September, 1916, but it would appear from the letter to Lady Gregory that Yeats had been working on it for some months.