IRISH POETS OF THE INSURRECTION.• THE number of Irishmen in
whom the poetic or literary impulse was strong who took an active part in the Easter Rising of 1916 is remarkable. Of the four discussed in Poets of the Insurrection,' three paid forfeit with their lives, and the fourth was condemned to death, released after his sentence had been commuted, and rearrested last August. Their verse, however, was seldom directly political or propagandist, as Professor Clery points out., and he ascribes this to the influence of Mr. Yeats and his colleagues in
• (1) Poets of the Insurrection. Dublin and London : Matinee' and Co. [Is. net.] —(2) Collected Works of Padraic II. Pearce. Songs of the Irish Rebels and Specimens front an Irish Anthology. Same publishers. [5e. net.)—(8) Poems of John Francis MarEntee. Edited. with an Introductory Rote, by ?ethic Gregory. Dublin The Talbot Prees. London : T. Fisher Unain. [2e. 6d. net.]—(4) Ireland r -a Song of nape, and other Poems. Ily Padric Gregory. Same publishers and twice.
the modem Irish movement, who had set themselves against the tradition of 1848, " in which (as they said) poetry perished in rhetoric." This is esFecially notable in the late Joseph Plunkett, the most literary of them all, who began as a loyal member of the Irish Party organization, but rebounded into extremism on Mr. Redmond's intervention in the Volunteer question. In spite of his ill-health, he was of an adventurous turn, had travelled widely, was at home in Paris and Algeria, versed in Continental literature, and had studied Arabic. He was, according to Mr. MeBrien, first and last a writer, eclectic and fastidious. In his love of the pomp and pageantry of verse one can trace French as well as English influences. He was a great admirer and follower of Francis Thompson, and, like him, a believer in the virtue of obscurity, of " mystery and hieroglyph." Mr. MeBrien notes also, and aptly illustrates, his Elizabethan affinities. If his poems in subject bear a strong resemblance to Francis Thompson's, " in treatment his sonnets often remind one of Shakespeare's." Ho boasted of his immor- tality, defied the ravages of Time, and proudly announced his choice of the rough and lonely way. Mr. McBrien's eulogy is at times extravagant ; but there is grandeur as well as grandiosity in the fine sonnet which opens with the lines :- " The glories of the world sink down in gloom, And Babylon and Nineveh and all Of Hell's high strongholds answer to the call, The silent waving of a sable plume."
The view of his personality given by Mr. MeBrien differs somewhat from that of Professor Clery. They both agree that he hated sentimentality ; but Mr. McBrien's insistence on his kindness and grace is hard to reconcile with Professor Clery's description of him as cold and reserved in ordinary intercourse, brilliant and expansive only among intimates, intellectual, determined, somewhat ruthless." Thomas MacDonagh, the oldest of the group, came, according to Professor Clery, much nearer the Irishman of tradition ; he was " sanguine, talkative, good-humoured, kindly, adventurous, pleasantly vain." Professor O'Neill, S.J., dwells on his twofold character : the mixture of ease and energy, which was reflected in his verse, now " eloquent and rhetorical " and now " brief, intense, and reserved." Like Joseph Plunkett, he passed from the Party organization to the extreme section. His patriotism was void of brooding over the past or misgivings as to the future. It was the " red-hot hope of a resolute rebel," and his curious play, which appeared in 1908, When the Dawn is Come, the title of which is borrowed from a line in his finest poem, is, in Professor O'Neill's words, " a very frank staging of an anticipated Irish rebellion," in which seven Generals and a woman form the Supreme Council of Ireland. MacDonagh made a profound study of the Elizabethan poets, and published a remarkable essay on English metres, with special reference to Campion. In this essay, which led to his appointment to the staff of the National University, he endeavoured to prove that quantity, not accent, is the real basis of English verse, and that accent is relatively unimportant (owing to the peculiarities of Irish pronunciation) in Anglo-Irish verse. He was a good classical scholar and modem linguist, and a master of Irish. Brought up as a Roman Catholic, and for a while a member of a religious Order, he passed through a stage of unsettlement with vague and pantheistic leanings, but at the end returned to the faith of his youth.
Padraic Pearse was the most interesting and manysided of the group, a schoolmaster on original and innovating lines, a pamphleteer, speaker, writer of stories, translator, and poet, though his published poems are few. Professor Chary has the best reasons for his belief that Pearse deliberately refrained from using his powers for writing English verse out of a duty to the Irish language, in the revival of which he was deeply interested. The son of an English father, he was Hibernia ipse Hibernior, and, in his own words, held Irish hate of the English to be a scarcely less holy passion than Irish love of Natura or of Nature's God. Unlike Plunkett and MacDonagh, he was an extremist all through. Educated by the Christian Brothers, he based his educational system on religion and nationality ; and to promote this atmosphere compiled an Irish Passion Play and a Cuchulain Pageant in which the parts were taken by his pupils. Pearse's movement, Professor Clery maintains, was a Catholic Revolution, though he admits that the phrase is an oxymoron. Yet he and his fellow-workers " had religious tolerance in an abounding degree," and " no one, not even the liars, has suggested that as much as a cross word was offered to any one during Easter Week, on account of his religious opinions." (The italics are Professor Clery's.) Though apparently a genial companion, a great lover of children and of humour, he seems to have been specially attracted, in his translations from the Irish, by poems in which the thought of death and sacrifice was constantly present. In his rhythmical prose renderings he aimed at simplicity while endeavouring to preserve the march of the original. His few poems in English were chiefly in the form of vere libre. The volume of verse recently published= is entirely made up of translations. The " Songs of the Irish Rebels," dating from 1573 to 1652, are all passionate and plaintive and animated by a hate of the English, though not wanting in reproaches aimed against Irish dissensions and mutual jealousies. One of them is familiar in the freer version given by Sir Samuel Ferguson in his Lays of the Western Gael, and another is the anonymous " Little Dark Rose," the original of Mangan's famous " Dark Rosaleen." Mr. Pearse's rendering inclines one to his view that " the Irish poem is finer than Mangan's, having more of the wine of poetry and less of the froth of rhetoric." The volume is completed by some specimens from an Irish anthology in which the translator has reproduced with remarkable success " songs of unknown singers of hamlets and hillsides," taken down of recent years from women in Connacht, or drawn from other collections. The most affecting, the " keen for a drowned child," was written by an Irishman in America who is still living.
Mr. MacEntee, the youngest of the group (he was born in Belfast in 1889), came of rebel stock, though he too began as a supporter of the Parliamentary Party. By profession an electrical engineer, he commenced author early as essayist and poet. Mr. Padric Gregory, who writes on him in the Poets of the Insurrection, besides editing a volume of his poems,3 notes that while hating all that " England " means to an " enlightened and patriotic " Irishman, he was passionately fond of English Gothic architecture, English literature, and the English school of painters—particularly of the Pre-Raphaelites. Shunning publicity as a writer, " mild of manner and gentle of speech," he was yet prominent in action. During Holy Week, on the eve of the outbreak in which he took active part, he " spent his leisure in reading Spenser's Faerie Queen., two critical essays on Spenser, and a volume of the late Alfred Austin's essays." His published poetry shows abundant signs of discipleship. He was deeply influenced by the Elizabethans, and his imitations have charm, though not com- parable to Darley's. A poem on vagabondage recalls Stevenson, and there is a Swinburnian lilt in his appeal to " Ulstermen " and the graceful lines " Retrospection." The former is omitted from the collection. For the rest, he combines a profuse vocabulary with vehemence of expression ; he avoids obscurity, but lacks the wider vision, as well as the technical skill and scholarship, of Plunkett. The sonnets to his mother and his dead colleagues are marked by deep feeling. Mr. Padric Gregory' is not a poet of the insurrection in the sense in which the others are. He hopes ardently for the independence of Ireland, but in his poem on '` Ireland and World-Freedom " the tyranny of Turk and Teuton, Russian and Austrian, is violently denounced, while no specific mention is made of the iniquities of England. Many of his poems are frankly modelled on English exemplars, ballads and carols. He is enamoured of archaisms, and of words like " eldem," " nacreous," " enthundered.," and phrases such as " aeon-mute lips," but is at his best when he deviates into simplicity, as in the free translation from the Irish of the Bard's Lament. The book is unfortunately disfigured by many misprints, those on p. 9 being quite appalling.
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