Easter, 1916 of the poem resumes the first person narrative of the first and second stanzas. The stanza returns to the image of the stony heart: "Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart" (57–8), Yeats wrote, putting the determined struggle of Irish republicans in the Easter Rising in the context of the long, turbulent history of British colonialism in Ireland, as well as alluding to the immense psychological costs of the long struggle for independence. Indeed, the narrator cries, "O when may it suffice?", and answering his own question with the line, "That is heaven's part" (making an
Madeleine ffrench-Mullen Madeleine ffrench-Mullen Madeleine ffrench-Mullen (30 December 1880 – 26 May 1944) was an Irish revolutionary and labour activist who took part in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. ffrench-Mullen was a member of the radical nationalist women's organisation . In 1913 during the Dublin Lock-out, she worked in the soup kitchen in Liberty Hall. She subsequently joined the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). In the Easter Rising she worked in a first aid tent. She was arrested following the Rising but released the following month. She joined Sinn Féin and was elected to Rathmines District Council in 1920. Madeleine ffrench-Mullen