Easter 1916

Abstract

I The second chapter of Ulysses has Stephen Dedalus teaching in Mr. Deasy’s school in Dalkey. The class is reading Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, but Stephen also permits himself a reverie about historical facts: Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never w..