Overview

A quiet, personal elegy mourning the death of Edward Thomas, a close friend of Farjeon, who was killed in World War One. The poem contrasts the peacefulness of Easter Monday at home with the violent reality of war. Farjeon reflects on the shock of learning about his death after enjoying a tranquil morning, highlighting the emotional disconnect between home and battlefield.

Main themes

Friendship, grief, loss, nature, rebirth, irony, memory, war.

Tone and voice

Informal, conversational, bittersweet, innocent, understated, reflective. Uses first person voice to speak directly to Edward Thomas, creating intimacy and immediacy. Present tense is used to suggest he is still alive, deepening the emotional impact.

Context

Written in 1917 but published decades later. Farjeon was a well-known children’s author and poet. She had a close friendship with Edward Thomas and his wife Helen. Thomas enlisted in 1915, influenced (ironically) by Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. He died on Easter Monday 1917 at the Battle of Arras. Farjeon later published Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years in tribute.

Form and structure

The poem is an elegy, written to mourn Edward Thomas. It loosely follows the shape of a sonnet with 14 lines but doesn’t use regular rhyme or structure. The metre is mostly iambic pentameter, giving it a natural rhythm. A clear break after line nine may mark a turning point, showing the shift from peace to grief. This break also reflects the emotional distance caused by Thomas’s death.

Poetic devices to spot

• Apostrophe – direct address to Thomas: “you like to munch”.
• Present tense – maintains emotional immediacy and denial of death.
• Repetition – echoes phrases from Thomas’s letter to show closeness and contrast.
• Juxtaposition – peaceful garden scenes vs. violent battlefield.
• Irony – “Last letter” as both recent and final; “three letters that you will not get”.
• Understatement – final line conveys numbness and shock.
• Symbolism – apples and Easter egg as tokens of care; apple buds and Easter as symbols of rebirth.
• Enjambment – lines flow naturally, reflecting emotional continuity.
• Direct speech – quotes from Thomas’s letter add realism and poignancy.

by Eleanor Farjeon

The text of this poem is available in the CCEA Poetry Anthology, which can be downloaded from the CCEA website.

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A quiet reflection on the loss of a friend in war and the numb shock caused by realising their violent death occurred as the speaker enjoyed a peaceful morning in nature. First written in 1917, but not published until decades later.

• Title: ‘Easter Monday’ is the day after Easter Sunday, a holiday in spring and a time of celebration and renewal; the addition of the bracketed ‘In Memoriam E.T.’ changes the hopeful tone, making the reader realise this is dedicated to someone who has died.

• Themes: Friendship, grief, loss, rebirth, nature, the difficulty of understanding a sudden death.

• Tone: Informal, conversational, playful, innocent, bittersweet, understated.

• Speaker: First person perspective; the poet herself speaking on the very personal issue of the loss of her friend in World War One.

• Eleanor Farjeon was an English writer born in 1881 into an artistic family of writers, actors, and musicians. She began writing poems and stories at an early age and became a renowned children’s author when she grew up. Her open, pleasant nature and presence in the literary scene meant she had many friends among writers and artists of the day; she met Edward Thomas and his wife Helen in 1909 and began a close friendship with both, encouraging Thomas to write poetry himself.
• Edward Thomas enlisted in the army in 1915 and joined the fighting forces of World War One. Ironically, his decision to enlist was partly influenced by his friend Robert Frost’s soon-to-be-famous poem The Road Not Taken. Frost had meant it as a joke, gently mocking Thomas’s own indecision. Thomas took it much more seriously than intended. He fought for two years, writing letters to Farjeon throughout that time before being tragically killed on 9 April 1917 (Easter Monday) in the Battle of Arras – the “coming battle” Farjeon refers to in the poem. She uses the Romantic tradition of solace in nature as a theme in ‘Easter Monday’; Thomas used similar themes in his poetry.
• Farjeon continued her friendship with Helen after Thomas’s death, and went on to pay tribute to her late friend by publishing a memoir, Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years in 1958. In it, she included letters between them and insights into the friendship as well as tributes to Thomas’s own life and work, showing the extent of their relationship and her great respect and love for Thomas.

Only a little context is needed for each poem; where used, it should be applied to the point you're making.

• ‘Easter Monday’ is an elegy. The Latin phrase ‘In Memoriam’ (‘In memory of’) and the initials ‘E.T.’ included in brackets in the title alert the reader to the fact this poem is dedicated to someone who has died.
• The poetry collection in which ‘Easter Monday’ was first published, years after it was initially written, was called First and Second Love: Sonnets by Eleanor Farjeon. As this title suggests, the poem does use some conventions of a sonnet, including a 14-line structure. Both Shakespearean and Italian sonnet formats have set patterns of rhyme and typical places for a volta. However, Farjeon rejects these accepted standards in her poem, perhaps to show the shock of the death, or to show how hard it is to accept that he’s gone. She declines to use a rhyme scheme altogether, and arranges the structure in an unusual way, putting a ‘break’ after nine lines to leave the last five lines as a separate unit of thought in a separate stanza.

• The first section of the poem ends on Thomas’s last words to Farjeon. So, the break or gap in the poem can be said to symbolise his death in the interim, separating them forever despite the fact she does not realise yet what has happened. The volta in Farjeon’s unconventional sonnet could be thought of as this break, but it could equally be said to occur at the devastating last line, in which the reader learns about the letters her friend will not get. Finally, she fully understands he has died. There are therefore two different possible ‘turning points’ at which our understanding of the poem starts to change, not just one. This highlights the lag of blissful ignorance she experiences between the death occurring far away and her actually finding out about it.
• The poetic metre is not fully regular, but mostly uses iambic pentameter. One ‘iamb’ is a two-beat combination: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed (emphasised) syllable, making a ‘da-DUM’ pattern, like a heartbeat. Pentameter means five of these two-beat units per line, making 10 syllables altogether:
  
  | You thanked | me for | the sil- | -ver East- | -er egg |
  | da-DUM | da-DUM | da-DUM | da-DUM | da-DUM |
  
  Not every line uses iambic pentameter, or even has 10 syllables (there are 12 syllables in line 11, for example: “It was such a lovely morning. In our garden”), but for the most part the poem follows the metrical pattern of 10 iambs per line.

• Apostrophe: ‘Easter Monday’ uses apostrophe. Farjeon speaks directly to her friend, calling him “you” and even speaking in the present tense: “the box of apples / You like to munch beyond all other fruit”. This gives a clear sense of informality, familiarity, and closeness between the speaker and the person she is addressing. The choice of present tense – “you like” rather than ‘you liked’ – gives a sense of immediacy, making it seem the addressee is still alive and making his death more jarring for the reader, just as it was for the speaker.

• Repetition: Lines six to nine and 10 to 13 of the poem mirror each other, creating a kind of parallel between Thomas and Farjeon. These lines straddle each side of the physical split in the poem that can be understood to represent his death. From line six to line nine, she notes his “praise” for “Easter Monday” (actually referring to “the Monday before Easter”, which is when he uncovered her gift of an Easter egg that it made him feel like it was actually Easter already), saying “It was such a lovely morning” because of the treat she sent; he further notes “’This is the eve’”, meaning the night before the battle, and asks for a “letter” soon. After the gap, Farjeon echoes all these sentiments, noting “That Easter Monday was a day for praise, / It was such a lovely morning”, saying “It was the eve” (here meaning the day before she found out he had died) and finally, tragically stating that she has answered his request and written “three letters” but that he will never be able to read them.
  
  The repetition of these words and phrases shows their closeness as friends, but also highlights the terrible contrast in their situations and the tragic, painful irony that comes from considering how a person carries on living a normal life when they are blissfully unaware that a loved one has suddenly died. The repeated mention of “the eve” carries an ominous, foreboding tone, which first alerts the reader to the fact Thomas will die in the battle he mentions. Then it emphasises Farjeon’s innocent happiness on the day of her friend’s death because she will not be made aware of it until the following day.

• Juxtaposition: Farjeon sets the second section of the poem on the day of Easter Monday itself. This allows her to juxtapose her own situation – leisurely, wholesome time spent in the garden with her family (“we”), planting seeds and enjoying the new blossoms of spring – with the implied situation of her friend. His earlier letter contained the foreboding mention of a “coming battle”, and we later learn he died that same day in the fighting. The contrasting scenes offer a juxtaposition of life and death, peace and war, and creation and destruction, highlighting the tragic irony of Thomas dying in spring, the season of rebirth. The poignancy of Farjeon echoing her friend’s words from his letter helps create a parallel between them, while emphasising the shock she feels upon realising that as he died, she was happily unaware and enjoying “such a lovely morning”.

…and said, 'This is the eve.
'Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon'…

…It was the eve,
There are three letters that you will not get.

• Irony: The hidden double meaning in “last letter” isn’t hugely obvious on first reading; the reader would usually assume that the speaker was using “last” to refer to ‘most recent’, but we later realise she actually means the final letter she would ever receive from Thomas, loading the word with irony. There is also dramatic irony in the fact that the speaker experiences a tranquil, blissful morning in the garden, surrounded by peaceful nature and signs of new life, all the time not knowing her friend has died violently in the battle he spoke of. The last line itself is an example of ironic understatement – “There are three letters that you will not get” – as the reader realises the dreadful reason that Thomas will never get the letters that Farjeon has continued to write while unaware he is gone forever. The understatement conveys her sense of shock and numbness at learning of his death.
  
  The physical distance between her life in London and his in France is mirrored by the distance in time it takes for the message of his death to come through; Farjeon further illustrates this distance with her removed, detached tone. This ironic detachment purposely understates her grief and pain, turning them into a sense of surreal shock and numbness to highlight the unfathomable difficulty of understanding or accepting the sudden death of someone who was close to her.

• Symbolism: The food sent by Farjeon to Thomas as he experiences the terrible conditions of trench life is symbolic of her care for him. She knows he loves apples and sends a box of them, with the extra treat of an Easter egg playfully hidden inside. It is a testament to the affection and regard in their friendship, which will make her loss of him seem more tragic. The apples appear again in the poem during her peaceful “lovely morning” at the time of his death – “in the orchard/ The apple-bud was ripe” – showing the flowering of spring beginning a new crop of apples to enjoy, symbolising a future that Thomas will never experience. Easter itself is symbolic in Christianity of rebirth and resurrection, making it all the more ironic and unjust that he has been killed in the season of new life.

This is not a list of every method or notable use of language and structure in ‘Easter Monday’.

Look at the poem again. Can you find any of the following?

If you have found these methods, consider what you know about the poem and the poet already.

What effects do these methods create? Why has she used them?

• Bayonet Charge – both poems use some nature imagery but vary wildly in their viewpoint and tone; in contrast to Farjeon’s distance, unawareness and understatement, this poem gives a vivid account from the front lines, capturing the raw, immediate panic and fear of a soldier under attack.

• Anthem for Doomed Youth – while Farjeon struggles to process the idea that her friend has been killed even as she continued to write to him, Owen graphically confronts the inadequacy and hypocrisy of mourning those lost at war; his allusions to those at home who grieve the fallen personally bear some resemblance to Farjeon’s tragic personal loss.

• Poppies – both poems use a somewhat under-represented point of view in war poetry by giving voice to women who have lost a loved one directly to war – Farjeon speaking of her friend, Weir of a mother losing her son.

Use these questions to hone your knowledge of ‘Easter Monday’, and to practise using your notes and analysis in organised paragraphs that focus on how particular themes or ideas are shown in the poem. There is an example answer in the following section to demonstrate how you can do this.

• How does Farjeon show a sense of close friendship between the speaker and the addressee in ‘Easter Monday’?
• What does ‘Easter Monday’ show us about Farjeon’s attitude to the war?
• What poetic methods does Farjeon use to show her sense of loss in ‘Easter Monday’?
• How does Farjeon create a tragic tone in ‘Easter Monday’?

Below is a demonstration of how to use the material in this section to answer an example essay question. The answer below is not a full essay, but only an extract of a longer answer showing some of the points that could be made.

Q: How does Farjeon show a sense of close friendship between the speaker and the addressee in ‘Easter Monday’?

A: ‘Easter Monday’ is a fairly innocuous title by itself, evoking a spring holiday and a time of rebirth and positivity after the cold darkness of winter; however, Farjeon adds to it a subtitle in brackets: ‘In Memoriam E.T.’ – this immediately informs the reader that the poem is an elegy, dedicated to the memory of someone who has died. The fact the death has inspired the poem shows how much the person must have meant to the poet. Farjeon uses a first person speaker to relate her own personal experience of finding out her friend, the poet Edward Thomas who had enlisted in the army in 1915 and spent two years fighting in the trenches of World War One, had been killed. Some conventions of a sonnet format are used in the poem; sonnets were commonly written for and about loved ones, so this choice of format speaks to the affection and regard she held for Edward Thomas as a close friend. Farjeon was friends with both Thomas and his wife Helen; she directly addresses Thomas throughout the poem using apostrophe, showing that even though he is now dead, she still feels the need to speak directly to him, as though to her, he is still alive. This shows both the difficulty she has accepting his death and the closeness of the friendship they enjoyed.

In the opening lines of the poem Farjeon describes how Thomas has written to thank her for sending him a box of apples and how much he appreciated the “silver Easter egg” she hid within the box. The sending of extra food to a friend on the front lines, where living conditions were generally appalling, is symbolic of the care and attention she paid to Thomas. The playful hiding of an extra treat within suggests the light-hearted and fun side of their friendship. She knows her friend’s tastes, having selected apples in the knowledge that they were something he liked “to munch beyond all other fruit”; her choice of the colloquial, onomatopoeic term “munch” suggests an informal chumminess between the two, indicating a close and easy friendship. She also uses present tense to convey his feelings about the apples – “you like” rather than ‘you liked’ – which gives a sense of immediacy, as if he is still alive to her, suggesting how close they were as friends and how hard she finds it to accept that he is now gone.

This essay could go on to make the following points, backed up by evidence from the poem and detailed analysis of that evidence:

• Farjeon uses direct speech to directly quote from Thomas’s “last letter”, making him seem more present and real for the reader, and highlighting their close friendship in the informal and conversational tone of the writing.
• Farjeon uses repetition of various words and phrases from Thomas’s letter in her own account of the Easter Monday morning, showing their shared outlook as friends and creating a parallel between them that bridges his death. This is symbolised by the split or gap Farjeon puts after line nine of the poem.
• Farjeon uses irony at several points in the poem to highlight the tragedy, emphasise the loss she feels, and illustrate the shock and numbness of accepting the death of someone that meant so much to her. This conveys the closeness of their friendship.