Mother

 

Of all the leaders of the Easter Rising, Patrick Pearse is perhaps the most fascinating.  Poet, teacher, educator, headmaster, Irish language enthusiast, lawyer, orator, cultural nationalist, he was an idealistic and intelligent man as well as a fervent and passionate revolutionary. Pearse was the figurehead of the Rising, the one who read the Proclamation outside the GPO and also the main man behind the writing of it. 

PH Pearse or Padraig MacPiaras or simply 'Pat' to his family and friends, was a complex character and also a contradictory one, held equally in admiration and criticism by biographers since. While his speeches from 1914 on are filled with an inflammatory rhetoric of violence and a lust for 'blood sacrifice', the same man was to be found faltering at the sight of bloodshed in the GPO and ultimately surrendered to prevent any further civilian casualties. 

After he was executed, General Blackadder, President of the court martial is acknowledged to have said of Pearse: "I have had to condemn to death one of the finest characters I have ever come across. There must be something very wrong in the state of things that makes a man like Patrick Pearse a rebel."

Pearse wrote this poem, one of his most famous, for his mother Margaret, urging her not to grieve for her losses, knowing that he and his brother Willie (who only played a small part in the rebellion) would inevitably be killed for their part in the Rising.  Also included below is the poem he wrote in his cell in Kilmainham, the night before his execution.

#1916EasterRisingPoets

Mother - Patrick Pearse

I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge
My two strong sons that I have seen go out
To break their strength and die, they and a few,
In bloody protest for a glorious thing,
They shall be spoken of among their people,
The generations shall remember them,
And call them blessed;
But I will speak their names to my own heart
In the long nights;
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth.
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in their coming and their going;
And tho' I grudge them not, I weary, weary
Of the long sorrow - And yet I have my joy:
My sons were faithful, and they fought.

The Wayfarer - Patrick Pearse

 

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening,
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy.
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.

Wishes For a Son

 

Thomas McDonagh was not only an accomplished poet but a playwright also, as well as teacher and lecturer of English Literature at UCD. An unlikely revolutionary and Rising leader to say the least. He was an amicable person by all accounts, perhaps the most personable of all the Rising leaders,  as well as an effective rebellion planner and leader. His poems are lyrical pieces that focus mainly on his family and generally relating to life and love. This poem however, also hints at the reasons why he was partaking in the Rising - for the good of the children of Ireland, the generations to come.

Perhaps it is McDonagh's epitaph that speaks the truest of him. The British soldiers who carried out the executions said that although all the leaders died well, McDonagh died 'like a prince.' 

#1916EasterRisingPoets

'Wishes For My Son, Born On St Cecilia's Day, 1912' - Thomas McDonagh
 

Now, my son, is life for you,
And I wish you joy of it,-
Joy of power in all you do,
Deeper passion, better wit
Than I had who had enough,
Quicker life and length thereof,
More of every gift but love.

Love I have beyond all men,
Love that now you share with me-
What have I to wish you then
But that you be good and free,
And that God to you may give
Grace in stronger days to live?

For I wish you more than I
Ever knew of glorious deed,
Though no rapture passed me by
That an eager heart could heed,
Though I followed heights and sought
Things the sequel never brought.

Wild and perilous holy things
Flaming with a martyr's blood,
And the joy that laughs and sings
Where a foe must be withstood,
Joy of headlong happy chance
Leading on the battle dance.

But I found no enemy,
No man in a world of wrong,
That Christ's word of charity
Did not render clean and strong-
Who was I to judge my kind,
Blindest groper of the blind?

God to you may give the sight
And the clear, undoubting strength
Wars to knit for single right,
Freedom's war to knit at length,
And to win through wrath and strife,
To the sequel of my life.

But for you, so small and young,
Born on Saint Cecilia's Day,
I in more harmonious song
Now for nearer joys should pray-
Simpler joys: the natural growth
Of your childhood and your youth,
Courage, innocence, and truth:

These for you, so small and young,
In your hand and heart and tongue.

Blood Upon the Rose

Joseph Mary Plunkett was the youngest of the signatories of the Rising at 28 years old and also by far, the most eccentric. He was known for his extravagant nature, often to be seen waltzing about Dublin in a cape in flamboyant flair. All his life Plunkett suffered from poor health but it was never a deterrent. He was a very well-travelled and well-read young man as well as a poet. He was the military strategist for the Rising and attended the GPO with his throat bandaged from his most recent operation. He was married to his fiancee Grace Gifford in Kilmainham jail, the night before his execution.

Plunkett wrote many poems, but this perhaps is his most famous, written in the mystical tradition and expressing the intensity of his own Christian faith. In retrospect, it almost speaks of an uncanny prophetic doom of blood sacrifice, of which his part in the Rising would condemn him. 

#1916EasterRisingPoets

 

I See His Blood Upon the Rose - Joseph Mary Plunkett

I see his blood upon the rose And in the stars the glory of his eyes, His body gleams amid eternal snows, His tears fall from the skies.

I see his face in every flower; The thunder and the singing of the birds Are but his voice—and carven by his power Rocks are his written words.

All pathways by his feet are worn, His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, His cross is every tree.

Easter 1916

 'A terrible beauty is born...'

Easter Monday, a hundred years ago, Ireland took the first step in pursuing an Irish Republic with the Easter Rising of 1916. This armed insurrection was ultimately a failure, but from its ashes rose triumph in the resulting War of Independence and Treaty. 

There are many startling feats about the Easter Rising, but perhaps the most noteworthy is that it was a rebellion led by poets and writers. 

All week, I will be posting some of their poems here to mark the centenary occasion as well as poems relating to the Rising. Up first is Yeats now famous response to the Rising and that immortal line: 'All changed, changed utterly, a terrible beauty is born' (-the dream of independence is established, but so too militant nationalism) that captured not only the pathos of the event, but the transformative feeling in the aftermath of the Rising so brilliantly. 

Easter 1916 - WB Yeats

I have met them at close of day   

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey   

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head   

Or polite meaningless words,   

Or have lingered awhile and said   

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done   

Of a mocking tale or a gibe   

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,   

Being certain that they and I   

But lived where motley is worn:   

All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent   

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers   

When, young and beautiful,   

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school   

And rode our wingèd horse;   

This other his helper and friend   

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,   

So sensitive his nature seemed,   

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,   

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,   

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone   

Through summer and winter seem   

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,   

The rider, the birds that range   

From cloud to tumbling cloud,   

Minute by minute they change;   

A shadow of cloud on the stream   

Changes minute by minute;   

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   

And a horse plashes within it;   

The long-legged moor-hens dive,   

And hens to moor-cocks call;   

Minute by minute they live:   

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.   

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part   

To murmur name upon name,   

As a mother names her child   

When sleep at last has come   

On limbs that had run wild.   

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;   

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith   

For all that is done and said.   

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;   

And what if excess of love   

Bewildered them till they died?   

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride   

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

*Listen to Liam Neeson reading the poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLt_OuzW9n0

An Easter Carol

 'this is the time of loves...'

 

I love the joyous tone in this poem. Like many Easter poems, religious joy is fused to jubilant effect with the joy of spring.

 

An Easter Carol - Christina Rosetti

 

Spring bursts to-day,

For Christ is risen and all the earth’s at play.

 

Flash forth, thou Sun,

The rain is over and gone, its work is done.

 

Winter is past,

Sweet Spring is come at last, is come at last.

 

Bud, Fig and Vine,

Bud, Olive, fat with fruit and oil and wine.

 

Break forth this morn

In roses, thou but yesterday a Thorn.

 

Uplift thy head,

O pure white Lily through the Winter dead.

 

Beside your dams

Leap and rejoice, you merry-making Lambs.

 

All Herds and Flocks

Rejoice, all Beasts of thickets and of rocks.

 

Sing, Creatures, sing,

Angels and Men and Birds and everything.

 

All notes of Doves

Fill all our world: this is the time of loves.

 

Happy Easter/Earth

I just love this time of year, the exhilaration of spring beginning, don't you? This poem captures it simply and singingly.



Easter - Joyce Kilmer

The air is like a butterfly
With frail blue wings.
The happy earth looks at the sky
And sings.

Good Friday

Lyrical and profound, as ever from Heaney. (And I just love the inclusion of the moon here -  how unusual, but fitting, as we see.)


Westering - Seamus Heaney

I sit under Rand McNally’s
'Official Map of the Moon’—
The colour of frogskin,
Its enlarged pores held

Open and one called
‘Pitiscus’ at eye level—
Recalling the last night                                                                                                                               In Donegal, my shadow

Neat upon the whitewash
From her bony shine,
The cobbles of the yard
Lit pale as eggs.

Summer had been a free fall
Ending there,
The empty amphitheatre
Of the west. Good Friday

We had started out
Past shopblinds drawn on the afternoon,
Cars stilled outside still churches,
Bikes tilting to a wall;

We drove by,
A dwindling interruption,
As clappers smacked
On a bare altar

And congregations bent
To the studded crucifix.
What nails dropped out that hour?
Roads unreeled, unreeled

Falling light as casts
Laid down
On shining waters.
Under the moon’s stigmata

Six thousand miles away,
I imagine untroubled dust,
A loosening gravity,
Christ weighing by his hands.

Silver Rain

In Time of Silver Rain - Langston Hughes

In time of silver rain
The earth puts forth new life again,
Green grasses grow
And flowers lift their heads,
And over all the plain
The wonder spreads

Of Life,
Of Life,
Of life!

In time of silver rain
The butterflies lift silken wings
To catch a rainbow cry,
And trees put forth new leaves to sing
In joy beneath the sky
As down the roadway
Passing boys and girls
Go singing, too,

In time of silver rain When spring
And life
Are new.

Spring Grass

"Shoots of the big green whisper of the year..."

Yep, it's going to be Spring poems all week here to celebrate its arrival at last.


Spring Grass - Carl Sandburg

Spring grass, there is a dance to be danced for you.
Come up, spring grass, if only for young feet.
Come up, spring grass, young feet ask you.

Smell of the young spring grass,
You're a mascot riding on the wind horses.
You came to my nose and spiffed me. This is your lucky year.

Young spring grass just after the winter,
Shoots of the big green whisper of the year,
Come up, if only for young feet.
Come up, young feet ask you.

Nothing is So Beautiful as Spring

 

 

'Nothing is so beautiful as Spring' - I agree! Now with the Vernal Equinox, it is officially here, yay!

 

Spring - Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         

   When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;         

   Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush         

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring         

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

   The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush         

   The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush         

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.         

What is all this juice and all this joy?         

   A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,         

   Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,         

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,         

   Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.         

Spring Again

"let's try, with the practical birds, 

to praise love's ways."

Spring Again - Anne Stevenson

A touch of blue
in the look of the air -
that tangy, Mozartian

unsuspicious colour.
Naive light rounding a
steel-scrubbed corner.

Wide-open beech tree,
bare still,
pregnant with flower.

Who can believe a
summer will relieve
this undernourished hour?

Between Mersh and Averil,
When spray beginneth to springe, 
The lutel fowl hath hire wil...

Though the elm's low bough
that should be in leaf
is not here now.

The thrush is gone
from the brushwood sheaf,
and that blackened thorn

is a rack of hooks
with plastic sacks
to hang wet weather in.

For all that's wrong,
Lenten is come with love to towne. 
New times, old words.

In a light green haze,
let's try, with the practical birds,
to praise love's ways.

Sweet Spring

 

 

 "Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie;"

 

 

Virtue - George Herbert

 

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,

The bridal of the earth and sky;

The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,

         For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave

Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;

Thy root is ever in its grave,

         And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,

A box where sweets compacted lie;

My music shows ye have your closes,

         And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,

Like season'd timber, never gives;

But though the whole world turn to coal,

         Then chiefly lives. 

 

After Years

After Years - Ted Kooser

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

Poem With Two Endings

 'Death and Life' by Gustav Klimt

Poem With Two Endings - Jane Hirshfield
 
Say ‘death’ and the whole room freezes –
even the couches stop moving,
even the lamps.
Like a squirrel suddenly aware it is being looked at.

Say the word continuously,
and things begin to go forward.
Your life takes on
the jerky texture of an old film strip.

Continue saying it,
hold it moment after moment inside the mouth,
it becomes another syllable.
A shopping mall swirls around the corpse of a beetle.

Death is voracious, it swallows all the living.
Life is voracious, it swallows all the dead.
Neither is ever satisfied, neither is ever filled,
each swallows and swallows the world.

The grip of life is as strong as the grip of death.

(but the vanished, the vanished beloved, o where?)

The Work of Happiness

The Work of Happiness- May Sarton

I thought of happiness, how it is woven

Out of the silence in the empty house each day

And how it is not sudden and it is not given

But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.

No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark

Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.

No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,

But the tree is lifted by this inward work

And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

So happiness is woven out of the peace of hours

And strikes its roots deep in the house alone:

The old chest in the corner, cool waxed floors,

White curtains softly and continually blown

As the free air moves quietly about the room;

A shelf of books, a table, and the white-washed wall—

These are the dear familiar gods of home,

And here the work of faith can best be done,

The growing tree is green and musical.

For what is happiness but growth in peace,

The timeless sense of time when furniture

Has stood a life's span in a single place,

And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir

The shining leaves of present happiness?

No one has heard thought or listened to a mind,

But where people have lived in inwardness

The air is charged with blessing and does bless;

Windows look out on mountains and the walls are kind.

Persephone, Falling

A different take on the Persephone myth...


Persephone, Falling - Rita Dove

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled,
stooped to pull harder—
when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished. No one heard her.
No one! She had strayed from the herd.

(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Don’t answer to strangers. Stick
with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.)
This is how easily the pit
opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

Where My Books Go

Today is World Book Day and I can't recall whether I 've posted this poem before here, but my, do I love it so.


Where My Books Go - WB Yeats

All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darken’d or starry bright.

The China Painters

I love Ted Kooser's poetry. The last line of every one is guaranteed to make you swoon.

The China Painters - Ted Kooser 

They have set aside their black tin boxes,   

scratched and dented,

spattered with drops of pink and blue;   

and their dried-up, rolled-up tubes   

of alizarin crimson, chrome green,   

zinc white, and ultramarine;

their vials half full of gold powder;   

stubs of wax pencils;

frayed brushes with tooth-bitten shafts;   

and have gone in fashion and with grace   

into the clouds of loose, lush roses,   

narcissus, pansies, columbine,   

on teapots, chocolate pots,

saucers and cups, the good Haviland dishes   

spread like a garden

on the white lace Sunday cloth,   

as if their souls were bees

and the world had been nothing but flowers. 

Ten Syllables for Spring

Hello March, month of daffodils, or what are affectionately known here as 'daffylonglegs.' 
 


Ten Syllables for Spring - Sue Cowling

daffylonglegs
blowing
buttered trumpets.