Butler Act

Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations tells the story of the fictional Donegal village of Baile Beag during the First Ordnance Survey of Ireland – a mapping of the country and anglicizing the Irish names of the places. The major theme of the play is language, and more specifically how the loss of a language can also help erase people’s history, culture and identity. In the 1800s Ireland was still a predominantly Gaelic-speaking nation. In 1975, only 2.7% of Irish speakers possessed a native…

William Butler Yeats was a very talented poet. In his lifetime he accomplished many great things. He was a 20th century Irish poet. He helped with the foundation with the Abbey Theatre, and later served as an Irish senator. He was well known for believing in occults, and including them in his works. Also, William Butler Yeats was a pervert. The study of the childhood of William Butler Yeats, his natural origin, his religious beliefs, and his Irish decent affected the style and setting of his…

There is more than one side to every story. When tragedy or calamity strikes, it affects people in different ways. Past events, loyalties, and moral viewpoints define how one sees a situation. Concerning the Easter 1916 uprising, Yeats seems to change his views of the people involved and explores his feelings in the poem “Easter 1916.” Yeats, at the start of the piece, seems to have a fairly low view of the rebels. He respects the nobility and bravery of what the revolutionaries did, but isn’t…

“Fate of the Sons of Usnach”, by Lady Gregory, was written for the people of Ireland. Lady Gregory took it upon herself to write the Cuchulain stories as the people of Ireland knew it and not how the scholars of the time would write it. Her rewriting of the Deirdre story may have been for the people, but it was not without its political motives. At this point in time there was a need for the Revival of the Irish people and Lady Gregory along with W.B. Yeats wanted to unite the people of Ireland…

society, many writers were disconnecting themselves from the commonplace culture. This created an estranged perspective for many writers, which would be an inherent feature of Modernist Literature. The “outsider” perspective can be seen in William Butler Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium and D.H. Lawrence’s Snake. In both of these works the chief characters struggle with a perceived alien existence, but these…

The poem ‘September 1913’ and ‘Easter 1916’ written with its title marking the year and one has September and the other with Easter. Both the poems has very harsh tone, written in iambic meter with AB, AB, CD,CD verses. The surface and the hidden meaning for both these poems have been portrayed as Yeats love towards his country and to the freedom fighter ‘Irish Men’. It is said “September 1913” is directly referring to workers strike, which Yeats is directly linked to “Romantic Ireland’s Dead…

Following North, Heaney’s next collection of poetry was Field Work which largely documents his four years spent in Glanmore County Wicklow. The significance of this move is that it took him South of the border with the Republic of Ireland, a haven away from the sectarian violence of the North. Inevitably, this could be assumed as Heaney’s deliberate removal from the political situation, however, Joshua Weiner wrote: While the move south seemed to some a deliberate withdrawal from a previous…

William Butler Yeats use of pastoral poetry in his poems Lake Isle of Innisfree and Easter 1916 his use of this type descriptive language evokes the reader to imagine a rural Irish life rich in folklore and fairytales. Yeats’ also urges his reader to envision life in the picturesque world, he used this style of writing to bring about a feeling of nationalism but with the preservation of Irish history. In the poem Lake Isle of Innisfree, Yeats uses pastoral imagery to describe the Western…

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” This quote from William Butler Yeats expresses how one’s heritage and background can affect a person’s way of life. Also true of this is how one’s heritage can affect one’s work, as it did with Yeats and his poetry. Some of his more popular works are things like The Celtic Twilight, To Ireland in the Coming Times, or A Prayer to My Daughter. However, where he born elsewhere, everything from…

The poems Africa and Flying Man by Rabindranath Tagore show the negative effects of man-made destruction. The destruction is the way they have mistreated the people of Africa, as well as changing the way nature used to be, from the peaceful harmonious nature to inventing more modernised technologies, making man seem more arrogant. The focus of the two poems is how man has destroyed the earth with their actions, and the poet does this by using imagery and figurative language. In Africa, Tagore…