“Easter Monday” plays out its tragedy through a series of meaningful repetitions.
Farjeon splits her sonnet into two unequal parts, introducing a sudden stanza break after line 9. Readers who look closely will notice that this stanza break turns the poem into a hinged mirror. Before and after the gap, lines 5-9 and 10-14 reflect each other’s language:
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said, "I will praise Easter Monday now -
It was such a lovely morning." Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, "This is the eve.
Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon."
That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve.
There are three letters that you will not get.
In lines 5-9, the speaker describes what her friend had to say in his “last letter” to her. In lines 10-14, she describes what she was doing on Easter Monday, unaware that her friend had been killed. The speaker’s repetition of her friend’s words feels intimate: it’s as if the two are so close they speak in one voice. But that intimacy is also tragically ironic. In reusing her friend’s words here, the speaker only underscores the point that she didn’t know, for a whole day, that someone dear to her was dead.
The echo between “This is the eve” and “It was the eve” also draws a sad parallel between the two friends. When the soldier friend writes these words, he’s referring to the "eve" of a battle that’s about to happen—the battle in which he’ll die. When the speaker writes these words, the battle has already begun, and her friend has already been killed. For her, it’s the “eve” of learning this awful fact: her last day of blissful ignorance.
There’s a poignant little echo outside these mirrored passages, too. When the speaker observes that her garden’s “apple-bud was ripe” in line 13, readers might think back to the “box of apples” she sent her friend in line 2. Perhaps there’s just a hint of hope there, a vision of new life emerging in spite of grief and loss.
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