A few weeks ago, on Easter, I read Julian all the Easter poems I could think of, or at least before he got sleepy we read and looked at George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” which made his eyes go wide, and then we read Yeats’s “Easter 1916” a few times. “Easter 1916” is a poem I’ve always loved and one I can’t read without choking up a little. Yeats’s meditation on his friends and foes and his conflicted response to the strength of their commitment to Irish independence has unforgettable images—the grey Dublin streets and uniform crowds, a springtime stream all trembling and reflecting a world of motion—and an unforgettable refrain: “All changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born.”
Sometimes there are poems, or parts of poems, that I read over and over without being able to stop; sometimes I memorize parts of them so I can keep reciting, obsessively. This time the final stanza of “Easter 1916” caught me up and set me spinning. Here’s the stanza:
Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? 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.
Yeats is nobody’s feminist icon, which is where proposing to your beloved’s 23-year-old daughter after your beloved turns you down gets you. But the simile about mothering seems newly important to me these days, gorgeous and powerful and true: “Our part / To murmur name up on name / As a mother names her child / When sleep at last has come / On limbs that had run wild.”
Julian’s too young to run wild, but sometimes after he goes to sleep, when his little chunky kicky legs lie heavy and limp, when his little chunky arms that flail around his face and are beginning to reach for my hair and my nose are also heavy, his hands open in sleep, I stand over his crib stroking the bridge of his nose or I watch his eyelids and his little gold-flecked lashes closed on his cheek resting against my chest, and I say his name: “Julian, Julian, baby, you, Julian.” Here he is, he is here, and he is Julian. He’s here in this world, where he wasn’t before. I’ll do this now, and I’ll do this when he’s older, when he comes in smelling of grass and sunlight and air, and when he’s even older, when he thinks I’ve stopped doing it—name upon name, every name his name.
For Yeats, that simile—“as a mother names her child”—describes the only possible political work that “we” can do. I take that “we” to mean the poets, although it isn’t limited to the poets. We can’t answer the important questions. To know when injustice will end, if it will end, and what the right response to it is, is a wisdom beyond us. But the job of the poet isn’t just to name, but to name as a mother names her child. Our part: to speak each name with the full awareness of the singular presence to whom it refers; to name as if to bring into being again, with the full weight of that miracle; to charge each name with as much love as it can hold and even then to know it’s not enough; to name repeatedly, obsessively, and forever. To name even when the list of names is terrible beyond belief in its length and in its heartbreak. To name even, somehow, when we don’t have all the names yet.
One more thing about this poem. I’ve been thinking, too, about its meter, as I walk around the house shushing and bouncing—“ To murmur name up on name / As a mother names her child / When sleep at last has come / On limbs that had run wild.” The backbone here is triple meter, beating through the poem and coming in full, for example, in that refrain: “a TER-rib-le BEAU-ty is BORN.” (I hope someone reading this has strong ideas about what exactly this meter is—I don’t.) But what’s weird is that the majority of the lines scan in double, not triple, meter. That is: “to MUR-mur NAME upon NAME / on LIMBS that HAD run WILD”—only one triple foot in there, the one with “upon” in it. Most of the lines in the poem are like this one, iambic lines that contain a suppressed, choked back extra syllable in them: “when SLEEP (hic) at LAST (hic) has COME,” etc. This little hiccup of a choked-back beat reminds me of nothing so much as the involuntary sob that happens after you’ve been crying too hard, and then you’ve stopped but you can’t quite stop. Julian’s started doing this for the first time lately, in my arms while I comfort him after he cries. He’s also started crying real tears, and sometimes they leave salty traces down his face. I wipe them away, or I kiss them away, and I name and I name him.