"Beneath the mountain in Laska there was coming to birth a terrible beauty." (p. 324)
Poul Anderson paraphrases the refrain of WB Yeats' poem, Easter, 1916. (See also here.) Irish Republicans occupied the General Post Office in Dublin. Execution of their leaders was to inspire the War of Independence. Yeats foresaw the birth of a "terrible beauty" in the story of the Rising.
When Garth Ennis wrote a fictional account of the Easter Rising, one of his characters quoted this poem, written after and about the Rising, while inside the GPO during the Rising!
Anderson does not directly quote the poem but does acknowledge that its phrase, "a terrible beauty," has been incorporated, like a line of Shakespeare, into the English language.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
It was a bad mistake of the UK to execute the leaders of the Easter Uprising, no matter how angry many people were and how justified they believed execution was. The peculiar circumstances obtaining in Ireland then would have made it more prudent to simply commute death sentences for treason to exile from the British Empire. After all, the Uprising was not even popular in Ireland at that time!
I think Anderson also used that line about "a terrible beauty" to describe the sinister beauty of the explosion of a nuclear bomb.
Ad astra! Sean
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