Throughout this poem, Yeats is trying to understand how he really feels about the failure of the Easter Rising of 1916. He wrote this poem in 1921 , meaning he had five years to decide how he felt. But even after half a decade, he still can't say publicly whether the uprising was a good or bad idea. Yeats portrays the men involved in both a positive and negative light, but tends to be more positive than negative, showing that he actually supported the cause or perhaps just the people involved. Yeats says that one of them had "an ignorant good will" (18) and a "high-pitched" voice (20). Either way, no matter how he feels about the cause, he feels he needs to say something about these people and the legacy they left behind. Ultimately, the speaker cannot support what happened during the Easter Rising. But he can say that the fighters deserve to be remembered in a poem and will be remembered “whenever green is worn” (78). Ultimately, he never got over the feeling that he was right to stay out of the conflict. But he is always ready to recognize that the fighters did not die for