University of Virginia Library

Dedication

To you, my little daughters, happy in being
The daughters also of an Irish mother,
And happiest when no other
Than the sweet Irish air
Is on your cheeks; to you that blithely share
The gleesome hours, and catch their bliss a-fleeing,
I, with grave pen, inscribe this little book;
Desiring—nay, foreseeing—
That you shall live to look
On Ireland's Freeing.

IRELAND UNFREED

THE BOUND ONE

Thou whom not joys but perils and pangs allure:
The white foam's sister, as the white foam pure:
The dark storm's daughter, guarding long and late
That far-descended heirloom, ancient hate:
I cannot say—“In all things that concerned
Thee and thy hopes I never swerved or turned,
Or held with stumbling mind a wavering creed.
But this at least I can declare indeed:
Through days with tempest packed, with thunder piled,
My dream was of an Ireland Reconciled
By utter undoing of wrongs all Earth saw done,
And by full freedom to fair friendship won:
Not mocked and cheated, conquering some vain goal
That could but foil the hunger of the soul,
And left as now, with the inmost ills unchanged,
The Spouse whom wedlock hath the more estranged,
Whom bonds do the more direly rend apart;
No—but from long, long sickness of the heart
Delivered: healed with a more sovereign balm
Than the old deep hurts have known: and in blest calm—
An Ireland willing to be loved at last—
Risen from the agonies of the loveless Past,
Risen from a hundred shatterings, great and new.
O that 'twere mine to see that dream come true!

MORE THAN TROPHIES

Ev'n were thy freeing complete,
The marks thy fetters made
Could not for ever in a moment fade,
O Erin, from thy feet!
Why should they? 'Twere more meet
That they remained, to be in times afar
Held sacred, when perhaps mere glorying Power,
And all its idols of an age or hour,
Unreverenced are.

REPRISAL BY FIRE

And this, is this the justice that we claim
To have kept untarnished in all realms we sway—
This revel of vengeance, blotting the pure day—
These barbarous deeds, that well might make our name
A byword and a hissing and a shame
Throughout the Earth? This is the doom-paved way
By which great Empires in august array
March to their thunderous deaths 'mid rage and flame.
These are the acts that in an hour unblest
Cancel a thousand deeds benignly done,
Fling far away the good gains Wisdom won,
And striking home to Man's most inward breast
Make Domination seem a maniac jest
Heard 'mid the flare of a distempered sun.

TO THE PRIME MINISTER

(The Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd George)

When France was flame, and Belgium ashes, and while
O'er us the flying Death continually
Hung near, you rose to greatness. You were he
Who in the teeth of the enemy's might and guile
Did set a-whirring throughout all this isle
The Wheels of the Machine of Victory.
And when shall we forget it? When the Sea
Forgets his thunder, or the Morn her smile.
But O sad change! Chiefly, to-day, in this
Your mastery towers—that you forbear to stir
A finger, while your minions fierce and fell
Shatter doomed Ireland's homes, and build in her
A suburb of the great metropolis
Of evil and woe, whose name on earth is Hell.

TO SIR HAMAR GREENWOOD

No thin, pale fame, no brief and poor renown,
Were thy just due. Of thee shall wise Time say:
“Chartered for havoc, 'neath his rule, were they
Whose chastisement of guilt was to burn down
The house of innocence, in fear-crazed town
And trembling hamlet. While he had his way,
Converts untold did this man make each day
To savage hate of Law and King and Crown.”
Great propagandist of the rebel creed!
Proselytiser without living peer!
If thou stand fast—if thou but persevere—
'Twill be thy glory to complete indeed
Valera's work, that doth ev'n now so need
Thy mellow art's last touches, large and clear!

WASTED BLANDISHMENTS

TO AMERICA CONCERNING IRELAND

Friend with frank tongue, who o'er the unflattering sea
Dost likewise flatter not: who view'st the maze
And tangle of things through no vague-shimmering haze:
Pledge thou thy word, that if, long urged by thee,
We loose her bonds and set the Thralled One free,
That Morn-fair deed, crowned with Man's golden praise,
Shall not for us, in thy consenting gaze,
Prove the bright Mother of dark calamity!
Then shall we know that some who else might mar
The Dayspring, and drag Midnight from its grave—
Some whose imperial dreams are loth to die—
Will listen first beside the Western Wave:
Will hear thy thundered interdict afar,
And flee in terror lest they hear it nigh.

COMPLETE DELIVERANCE

“A leap in the Dark,” say the champions of Night.
O surely a leap from the Dark, into Light!

A GLORIOUS IMMUNITY

Thee, wounded Ireland, thee I gratulate;
First, on thy wounds; next, on that very fate
Whose malice hath yet spared thee one worse woe
Than even thou hast tasted. For although
Grievous is thraldom, in a world bethronged
With the proud wrongers and the prostrate wronged,
Far deeper is the unconscious misery
Of them that shackle those who would be free!
And though the thralled seem hapless, theirs who thrall
Is the most dark, lost, heavenless state of all.

TO ERIN ONCE MORE

Upon that Day when thou among thy peers
Shalt take the place that is by right thine own,
Judge not of England with a mind too prone
To harsh, hard thoughts! Though oft her palsying fears
Did freeze up noble purpose, hers were tears
For the world's heartache—hers no breast of stone.
She wronged thee much: but speak not blame alone,
When forth thou step'st into the happier years.
And when, disburdened of a cumbering weight,
Thou from the transitory and fugitive—
From thy dead yesterdays—art loosed, to live
At peace with God and Man and Time and Fate,
Be thine the greatness of the more than great,
Whose glory it is, divinely to forgive.

AFTER NEWS OF AN EXECUTION

Was it all folly—yonder, hour by hour,
To choose, not peace, but strife, and thereto dare
The lion couched in his unnative lair,
The world-feared lion, mighty to devour?
O that some folly as splendid were a flower
Not, on all shores but those, so wondrous rare!
Common as weed in Ireland everywhere
That splendid folly blooms, and hath the power
To make a mere slight boy not only face
Death with no tremblings, with no coward alarms,
But like a lover woo it to his arms,
Clasp with a joyous and a rapt embrace
Death's beauty, Death's dear sweetness, Death's pure grace,
And count all else as nought beside Death's charms.

TILL IRELAND HAS HER OWN

TO THE PRIME MINISTER YET AGAIN

(The Rt. Hon. D. Lloyd George)

Like your renown-clad namesake, who did slay,
Far across Time and its vast charnels drear,
If only with a legendary spear
A fabled dragon, you in your midday
Did unto ravening things give battle, and they
Felt your light lance through all their scales! They fear
That lance no more, perceiving but too clear
How rusted is its chivalry away.
Plunged is that spear in no foul monster's side,
But pointed at the Captive Maiden's breast,
Who, greenly robed, sits pining to be free.
For not as her Deliverer do you ride
Forth, but to bid her guards be adamant, lest
She escape i' the tempest from captivity.

TO AN IRISH PATRIOT

Your cause at its centre is pure: the wise plan
Is to keep its circumference pure—if you can.

TO AN OPPRESSOR

Come down from thy high seat!
If with the blood of men
Its steps be slippery, the more easy, then,
The offsliding of thy feet!
And back thou never shalt be asked to climb
While this tired World ascends the stairs of Time.

THE TWO PUISSANCES

THE VISION

I looked forth through the Void,
And a dark Hand did draw
From the near West a curtain, and I saw
Dull Tyranny, on the breath of Folly upbuoyed;
And a blind surgeon, Statecraft, there employed
To keep the wounds of Ireland ever raw;
And Rapine, masked as Order, his vast maw
With vengeance still uncloyed;
And round these forms, a dance of lawless Law
O'er Liberty Destroyed.