‘A bit of shrapnel’
‘A bit of shrapnel’
The Sigerson Shorters, the Hardys, Yeats, and the Easter Rising
In the papers of the Irish poet Dora Sigerson (1866–1918) is an unpublished poem called ‘The Second Wife’, a satirical ballad dating from 1916 to 1918. The poem addresses the marital arrangements of Thomas and Florence Hardy, friends of Sigerson and her husband, Clement Shorter. This chapter examines the poem and the relations between the Shorters and the Hardys in relation to Anglo-Irish literary attitudes to the Irish rebellion against the British in 1916. Shorter also published Yeats, being the first to print ‘Easter, 1916’. Sigerson wrote a number of poems in her last volumes, The Sad Years, Sixteen Dead Men, and The Tricolour, about these events. The chapter considers how these poems reflect not just her anger against the lack of sympathy for the Irish cause in the liberal England in which she was based, but also her extreme imaginative projection on to the sacrifice of 1916.
Keywords: Easter Rising, 1916, martyrdom, Anglo-Irish Literature, elegy, sacrifice, Dora Sigerson, Clement Shorter, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats
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