First Mandatory Task (of Four)

Your first task: read the poem. Yeats composed “Easter, 1916” in response to a revolutionary uprising that four principal organizations effected in the city of Dublin and a few other locations in Ireland (e.g., the town of Enniscorthy, County Wexford) between Monday, April 24 (Easter Monday) and Saturday, April 29, 1916. Those entities were: (a) the Irish Republican Brotherhood (a secret, oath-bound entity, also known as the Fenians; founded in 1858); (b) the Irish Volunteers (founded in 1913); (c) the Irish Citizen Army (founded in 1913 by socialist trade unionists); and (d) Cumann na mBan (“the women’s council“; founded in 1914). Yeats completed composition of “Easter, 1916” on September 25, 1916; and (unusually for him) he included that date at the end of the lyric.

Mindful of earlier uprisings — such as the very bloody United Irish Rebellion of 1798 — the rebels of 1916 sought to end centuries of British colonial rule by establishing a sovereign Republic of Ireland (called in Gaeilge, the Irish language: Poblacht na hÉireann). Although the Easter Rising caught the British by surprise, the crown forces quickly defeated the insurgents. Between May 3, 1916, and August 3, 1916, the authorities executed the principal leaders, who became Irish national martyrs as the “Sixteen Dead Men.” Including those individuals, the death toll for the Rising was 82 rebels, 143 British-aligned combatants (army, police), and 260 civilians. While estimates vary, 27,405 is one scholarly figure for the number of Irish-born men who died while fighting in British military uniform in the Great War (World War I; 1914-1918).

One notes that the last three days of the Easter Rising (April 27-29, 1916) coincided with two German gas attacks as part of the Great War Battle of Hulluch in northern France. The British forces at Hulluch included the 16th Irish Division, a unit that recorded 442 deaths on April 27 alone. Characterizing the battlefield as a “valley of death,” one of the unit’s chaplains, Roman Catholic priest William Doyle, wrote, “[T]hey [the Irish soldiers in British uniform at Hulluch] lay in the bottom of the trench, in every conceivable posture of human agony; the clothes torn off their bodies in a vain effort to breathe.” In terms of both deaths and casualties, the 16th Irish Division would also suffer significantly in the subsequent Great War Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916 - November 18, 1916).

William Butler Yeats
(Jun. 1865 - Jan. 1939)
Easter, 1916

First stanza: Exclaiming (“All changed …”)

Second stanza: Personalizing (“That woman’s days …”)

Third stanza: Metaphorizing (“The horse … / The rider, the birds …”)

Fourth stanza: Claiming (“I write it out …”)

Second Mandatory Task (of Four)

Your second task: Read, Watch, Listen. The most important element of the second mandatory task is to read Parts I and II of “Shades and Angels 1916-1917,” the second chapter of the second (and final) volume of the definitive biography of William Butler Yeats. Those sections of the biography focus on the months during which Yeats authored “Easter, 1916.” The Write Now homework exercise for this module is about Foster’s text.

The chapter appears in W.B. Yeats: A Life, Volume II, The Arch-Poet 1915-1939, first published in 2003 by Oxford University Press. The author, Irishman Robert Fitzroy Foster (usually called R.F. Foster or Roy Foster), produced it while holding the Carroll Professorship in Irish History at the University of Oxford (Hertford College) in the UK. By contrast with most prior biographers of Yeats, Foster enjoyed the status of authorized biographer. He benefitted from access to a trove of archival material, much of it amassed by F.S.L. Lyons, a leading Irish historian, who had been working on Yeats’s life story but died unexpectedly with the project still incomplete.

In the artifact that you must read, you will find, in addition to Foster’s text (with endnotes): (1) Yeats’s poem; (3) your instructor’s “quick guide” to some of the key individuals and terms Foster invokes; and (3) a short overview of the Easter 1916 Rising (based on work by the historian John Dorney).

The document containing the Foster biography and the other, related material is available here: Yeats Poem and Foster Biography as a PDF. The link opens in a new window. You can also access the document by clicking the icon.

When you have completed Foster’s work, watch the three videos that follow immediately below. They are congruent with our broad humanities approach to studying William Butler Yeats’s masterful, 80-line lyric, “Easter, 1916,” considered by many to be the greatest political poem in the English language.

Third Mandatory Task (of Four)

Your third task: study the instructional content. In order to render the lectures as clear as possible, your instructor has captured their essential material in written form, presented below (via gold box) as a PDF: Written Account of Yeats Lecture Content. (The artifact opens in a new window.) Consider this document your primary resource when studying the focal text. You may also find useful the slides your instructor uses when delivering a portion of the greater “Easter, 1916” lecture.

• The lecture acknowledges W.H. Auden’s assessment of Yeats’s engagement, in “Easter, 1916,” with the type of poem known as the occasional poem.
• Using Patrick Pearse’s poetics of blood sacrifice as a context, the lecture contrasts Yeats’s refusal, in 1915, to compose a Great War poem with his committing, during the summer and early fall of 1916, to produce “Easter, 1916.”
• Deploying the concept of the dérive, the lecture examines the psycho-geography associated with Yeats’s creation of “Easter, 1916.”
• The lecture posits that huge Irish losses in the early days of Battle of the Somme may have influenced both line 68 and the final date in “Easter, 1916.”
• The lecture argues that the physical form of “Easter, 1916” may be indebted to a monument present in central Dublin in 1916.

EXAM WORDS

When preparing for your exam about this work of literature, ensure that you are fully up to speed with the following data (all of which receive explanation in the written account):

Easter Monday: April 24, 1916 ••• Opening day of the Somme: July 1, 1916 ••• Date that ends poem: September 25, 1916 ••• Home Rule ••• Black and Tan War ••• Anglo-Irish Treaty ••• Civil War ••• Irish Free State ••• Stormont ••• Patrick Pease’s father: nationality; occupation • W.H. Auden; Kenyon Review ••• Maud Gonne MacBride; Iseult Gonne ••• National Volunteers (pro-Redmond); Irish Volunteers ••• 16th Irish Division ••• Hulluch ••• Guillemont; Ginchy ••• St. Enda’s ••• Gaelic League ••• Will Rothenstein • Cotswolds; Woburn Buildings; Colleville-sur-Mer ••• Psychogeography; Guy Debord (situationalist); the dérive; ambiances ••• Dora Sigerson Shorter, “Sixteen Dead Men” ••• Verse: vetere ••• Know meanings of utter discussed on page 8 of Written Account of Yeats Material ••• Hugh Lane’s collection: the Continental Pictures ••• Renoir, Les Parapluies ••• Clement Shorter: 25 copies (1917) ••• The New Statesman; The Dial; Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1922) ••• Hermeneutics ••• General Post Office; Sackville (O’Connell) Street; the Aud ••• Nelson; Trafalgar ••• Pillar; Dublin United Tramway Company ••• Proclamation

In addition, make sure you are familiar with the following additional data, invoked in Foster’s essay:

Arthur Griffith; Sinn Féin (“Ourselves”) ••• James Connolly; Irish Citizen Army ••• Lolly (Elizabeth) and Lily (Susan) Yeats; Cuala Industries ••• Lady Augusta Gregory; Coole ••• Abbey Theatre ••• John MacBride

Fourth Mandatory Task (of Four)

Your fourth task: complete and submit — via Folio, before the deadline — the single Write Now (i.e. written homework) exercise about the focal literary text. Refer to your syllabus and/or the course Folio page to check the submission deadline. No late work is accepted.

There are 10 questions, presented in reading order. In other words: the questions chronologically track the PDFs that contain the assigned reading: Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” and the portion of Foster’s Biography of Yeats that examines "the poem. When attempting the questions, it’s advisable NOT to begin with Folio but instead to: (1) download a PDF containing the 10 Write Now questions as a single document (also available via the green bar below); and then (2) answer each question-set in a Microsoft Word document, which you should save as you proceed. That way, you’ll always have proof that you completed the exercise, even if Folio goes down or otherwise doesn’t cooperate. When you have finished the entire Write Now exercise, you should review it carefully, save it again, and then submit it via Folio — either as a Microsoft Word document or a PDF — before the firm deadline. The ability to submit ceases at that time, and effort not received before the deadline earns a grade of zero. Another way of saying the above: late submission isn’t possible. Remember, please, that your grade depends not just on correct responses but also: complete sentences; good grammar; accurate spelling; and clear expression.

Please be very mindful of the following statements, which appear on the course syllabus.

Do your own work. Students may not collaborate on the production of responses to Write Now quizzes (i.e. homework exercises). When grading, we pay close attention to similarities between submissions. A student found to have copied or otherwise relied on another student’s work (on even one occasion) — or found to have committed plagiarism — will receive an “F” for the entire course and, in addition, will be reported to the University for a hearing that may result in suspension or expulsion from GS.

Optional Extra Reading & Listening