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
Easter Rising Commandant of the 3rd Battalion, who did so partly because of his American birth. Most of the executions took place over a ten-day period: As the executions went on, the Irish public grew increasingly hostile towards the British and sympathetic to the rebels. After the first three executions, John Redmond, leader of the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party, said in the British Parliament that the rising "happily, seems to be over. It has been dealt with with firmness, which was not only right, but it was the duty of the Government to so deal with it". However, he urged the Government