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
Provisional Government of the Irish Republic Mac Diarmada, the original organisers of the Rising. Connolly, as leader of the Irish Citizen Army, would come after him. These four (plus Plunkett) were in the GPO Headquarters during the Rising, and military orders were issued by all four. Even the identity of the head of government is not altogether clear-cut. In all probability, such distinctions were unimportant to the leaders of the Rising, and in the lead-up to Easter 1916, and during Easter Week itself, all their energies were devoted to the military campaign. With their deaths in the first two weeks of May 1916 the first government