William Butler Yeats, Nobel laureate and Irish National poet, wrote a famous poem about it, "Easter 1916," that features the astounding couplet: "All is changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born." Did I mention I was born today, too?
It's an odd sort of synchronicity that brings me into the Uprising's orbit--though neither Irish nor Irish-American myself, Yeats somehow became my all-time favorite poet by dint of the sheer beauty of his song. He and this poem in particular have featured prominently in my PhD applications, in a seminar paper, Quals, Comps, my dissertation, and in various conferences, including one in Ireland itself. It's really a remarkable poem: he spends less time detailing the actual event itself than his wonder--and to a certain extent his terror--that it happened at all. It's a poem about how everything can change suddenly, completely, at once, when nothing seemed like it would ever change again.
And somehow, I didn't realize for years that the event this poem commemorates occurred on my birthday.
This feels tangentially related, somehow--because a birthday, on the surface, feels like just another day, arbitrary and meaningless, no more likely to break the endless monotony of X's on the calendar than any other.
That is, until it does. Completely. Radically. Earth shatteringly. Some birthdays do nothing but add some extra cake-starch to your system...but other birthdays change all, change utterly. We are the terrible beauty that is born. Let me live up to it.
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