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
The Boys of the Old Brigade The Boys of the Old Brigade "For the English slow march, see The Old Brigade" The Boys of the Old Brigade is an Irish rebel song written by Paddy McGuigan about the Irish Republican Army of the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), and the anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. The song describes a veteran of the Easter Rising telling a young man about his old comrades in the Irish Republican Army. Each chorus ends with the Irish language phrase ""a ghrá mo chroí" (love of my heart), I long to see, the Boys of the Old Brigade". Oh, father