Coincidance - Principia Discordia

Interview With
Sean MacBride
And what if excess of Iove
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in 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.
These lines from Easter 1916 are certainly the most famous (and perhaps
the greatest) political stanza that William Butler Yeats ever wrote; and I
cannot cross Dublin without thinking of fragments of it, as I pass Connolly
Station, say, or Pearse Station, or the General Post Office on O'Connell
Street where the rebels of 1916 made their last stand. My couplet, "I, a
pacifist, feel pride / For the ghost of John MacBride" in a poem earlier in this
anthology refers, among other things, to the fact that Major MacBride
refused the blindfold when the British shot him, saying in effect that he had
faced enemy bullets too often to fear them any longer.
Hugh Kenner may have been the first exegete to wonder what it cost Yeats,
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