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 Parliament on 14 December 1918, which resulted in a landslide victory for Sinn Féin, winning 73 seats out of 105, whose MPs gathered in Dublin on 21 January 1919 to form Dáil Éireann and adopt the Declaration of Independence. Shortly after the Easter Rising, poet Francis Ledwidge wrote ""O’Connell Street"" and ""Lament for the Poets of 1916"", which both describe his sense of loss and an expression of holding the same "dreams", as the Easter Rising's Irish Republicans. He would also go on to write "lament for Thomas MacDonagh" for his fallen friend and fellow Irish Volunteer. A few months