Poems since 1916

'My rhymes more than their rhyming tell' - WB Yeats

I recently launched a new anthology of Irish poetry, Windharp: Poems of Ireland since 1916. These poems offer a kind of potted history of Ireland during the past 100 years. As its editor, Niall MacMonagle, puts it, they speak 'of the country's people and beliefs, its landscape, its passions and politics, and the extraordinary changes that have occurred over the past hundred years.' This collection is a kind of repository of national experience since 1916, illustrating the poet, Paula Meehan's view that 'nothing is ever lost that makes its way into poetry'.

I want to reflect in particular on the first six poems in the collection, three of which have an Easter 1916 theme and two are inspired by World War 1. Taken together, these poems, and the diversity of their authors (two of whom lost their lives on the Western Front and one in the 1916 Rising), seem to me to capture the complexities of the period whose centenary we are now marking.

The first poem, ‘The Wayfarer’, is by Patrick Pearse, a man who has come to personify the Easter Rising of 1916. Pearse was a Gaelic League enthusiast and an enlightened educator who rose to become one of the driving forces behind the events of 1916. Best known as a passionate, inspirational nationalist orator, this piece shows his skill with words and his deeply melancholic frame of mind.

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass.
...
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht.
...
These will pass,
Will pass and change will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;

Pearse's poem is followed by one that continues the 1916 theme with Francis Ledwidge's ‘Lament for Thomas MacDonagh’, one of Pearse's fellow signatories of the Proclamation of the Republic. Ledwidge's elegy for the executed MacDonagh, is perhaps his finest work.

He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds
Above the wailing of the rain.

A fervent nationalist and an emerging writer, Ledwidge joined the Iniskilling Fusiliers in 1914 and fought at Gallipoli and in the Balkans. He was recuperating from war wounds when the 1916 Rising broke out and he found himself sympathising deeply with its leaders. Yet, after initially absenting himself from his regiment, Ledwidge returned to the front and was killed there in September 1917.

Yeats's ‘Easter 1916’, which may well be the finest public poem in 20th century English literature, is the collection's third poem. It is a powerful, sophisticated response to the events of 1916. Those events took Yeats by surprise but they moved him deeply, even if he was somewhat ambivalent about the Rising. ‘Easter 1916’ is full of phrases that imprint themselves on the memory - 'too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart' and 'changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born'. It is now difficult to think about what happened in 1916 without reference to Yeats's insightful analysis of those transformative events.

For Windharp's next poem, we go to the Western Front, and a piece written just days before his death by Tom Kettle,’ To my daughter Betty, the Gift of God’. This would deserve its place in any anthology of war poetry.

Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

Kettle came from a prominent Irish nationalist family. In 1906, he was elected as nationalist MP for East Tyrone but stepped down four years later to become an economics lecturer at University College Dublin. He joined the nationalist Irish Volunteers when they were set up in 1913 as part of the struggle for Irish Home Rule. Kettle was in Belgium seeking to purchase arms for the Irish Volunteers when the war broke out and witnessed the German invasion of that country which convinced him of the need for Ireland to take part in the struggle against Germany. He became a firm advocate of enlistment in the British Army and, although in poor health, he insisted on being sent to the front and was killed at Ginchy in September 1916.

By the time of his death, Kettle had already witnessed the Easter Rising and sensed that it had changed Ireland's political landscape. Kettle's idealism in the face of the appalling slaughter on the Somme reflects his staunch belief that the war was a struggle on behalf of European values shared by the Irish and the British.

The anthology’s fifth poem is another moving war poem, ‘The Long Vacation’ by Katharine Tynan, who was one of WB Yeats's earliest friends and literary collaborators. Her poem mourns the lost generation of those who failed to come home from World War 1.

The mothers watch the road till set of sun;
But nevermore the birds fly back to the nest.
The roads of the world run Heavenward every one.

Tynan's poem captures an experience that many Irish families endured during that appalling conflict. Some 200,000 Irishmen fought in the 1914-1918 war and between 35,000 and 50,000 perished during that terrible conflict.

The last poem I want to mention was written by Eva Gore-Booth about her sister Constance Markievicz, who was imprisoned in London following the Easter Rising. I recently visited Gore-Booth's grave in Hampstead and this reminded me of what an interesting figure she was and what a disservice Yeats did to her memory with his admittedly brilliant depiction of:

Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Eva Gore-Booth was a suffragette, a pacifist, a social worker, a trade unionist and a talented writer, who did not share all of her sister's views, but recognised they were both, in their different ways, 'wild rebels'. The poem, ‘Comrades’, was written about her sister when she was imprisoned in London following the Easter Rising.

The wind is our confederate,
The night has left her doors ajar,
We meet beyond earth's barred gate,
Where all the world's wild Rebels are.

There is very much more to Windharp, with many poems reflecting the diversity and complexity of contemporary Irish life. The collection also some includes poems in the Irish language. If, however, you are looking for a primer on the tangled strands of the Ireland of a century ago, the opening pages of Windharp are a good place to begin.

Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in London.