Joyce Kilmer opens by quoting someone else, and then picks a fight with him. The epigraph, "Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, / It's with O'Leary in the grave," comes from Yeats's "September 1913," and Kilmer repeats it at the start of the poem proper so he can interrogate it: "Then, Yeats, what gave that Easter dawn / A hue so radiantly brave?" The title and the dedication to Joseph Mary Plunkett point to the Easter Rising of 1916, and Kilmer treats it as a living refutation. Yeats declared romantic Ireland finished; Kilmer's reply, "Romantic Ireland never dies!", is the poem's central idea. The country's idealism has not been buried but planted.
That farming metaphor drives the imagery. On the day of the Rising there is "a rain of blood," "red rain in gay blue April weather." The picture is startling because it is so cheerful: the sky is blue, the rain is red, and "gay" refuses any note of mourning. The blood "blessed the earth till it gave birth / To valour thick as blooms of heather." Death becomes sowing, and the heroes become a crop. The next stanza keeps the idea going: O'Leary "lies in fertile ground," and "songs and spears" rise "where patriot graves are found." Graves are not endings here but seedbeds.
The form supports this confidence. The lines are short and mostly iambic, with a marching, song-like beat. The even lines rhyme (gone/dawn is only the start; weather/heather, ground/found), but the real ingenuity is in the third line of each stanza, which rhymes inside itself: "gave birth" echoes "earth," "songs and spears throughout the years," "loudly sweet" answers "Street," "leap from troubled sleep," "No prison bars can dim the stars." These chiming lines make the poem sound like the ballads it mentions. Kilmer even names "The Wearing of the Green" as the music filling O'Connell Street, and his own verse seems to want to be sung in the same way. Nearly every line is end-stopped and declarative, with exclamations and imperatives ("See Emmet leap") instead of doubts. It is a poem of certainty.
The middle of the poem is its most dramatic stretch. Kilmer turns to the dead and asks, "What banners rise before your eyes?" and then answers with a roll call of Irish heroes: Lord Edward leaves "his resting place," Sarsfield's face is "glad and fierce," and Emmet springs "from troubled sleep / To grasp the hand of Padraic Pearse." Centuries of rebels are woken up and linked together, so the newly dead are welcomed into a long line. Kilmer's point is continuity: the Rising is the latest chapter in one story, not a sudden outburst.
The final stanzas are blunt about what the rebels suffered. The images of "rope," "prison bars," and "quicklime" suggest hanging, imprisonment, and the destruction of bodies, and the poem sets them against things that cannot be destroyed: song, stars, "the living soul." Each is met with a "no" or a "nor," a series of flat denials that sound like a creed.
Religion comes in at the very end, and it changes the whole poem. "Her heart is fed on Heavenly bread, / The blood of martyrs is her wine." Bread and wine are the language of communion, so the dead are made to resemble Christ, and their sacrifice becomes a sacrament that nourishes the living. The Easter setting matters here too. Easter is the season of resurrection, and Kilmer has been staging resurrections all along, from the dead heroes rising to the blossoming earth.
That is what makes the poem interesting, and also what makes it one-sided. It is a tribute, not an inquiry, and it gives little room to the doubts a more cautious poet might feel about so much blood. But as an answer to Yeats it is lively and direct. Where Yeats mourned a lost ideal, Kilmer hears a country singing again, and he does it with images simple enough to remember: red rain, heather, bread, and wine.