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
Earl of Drogheda of his brother-in-law, Henry Hamilton, 2nd Earl of Clanbrassil. In a feast of egotism, he built and named Henry Street, Moore Street, Earl Street, Of (or Off) Lane (now Henry Place, and an important escape route for the volunteers fleeing the GPO during the Easter Rising in 1916), and Drogheda Street (part of what is now O'Connell Street). The third Earl was succeeded by his grandson Henry, the fourth Earl. The latter died without surviving children at an early age and was succeeded by his younger brother, Edward, the fifth Earl, who had previously represented Dunleer in the Irish Parliament.