The Irish Revolutionists
Reading edition
PADRAIC COLUM
The British Government, which was quite willing to exploit the sympathy felt here on the premature death of the young English poet, Rupert Brooke, shot to death three Irish poets, Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett.
Not only in Ireland, but the whole world is at a loss by the extinction of these three brave, honorable, and distinguished lives.
The English illustrated journals that have just come to New York enable us to estimate by a contrast the world’s loss. They have published the photographs of the Irish revolutionary leaders; and with them they have published the photograph of the man who ordered their execution, General Maxwell. On one side they give you intellectual and spiritual faces—the faces of men who liberate the world. On the other side they give you a heavy, non-intellectual, non-spiritual face—the face of a man who could never liberate himself.
The vision and the aspiration of Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett is on record for the world to know. A man cannot lie when he speaks of his vision or his aspiration in poetry. We know what Padraic Pearse thought of personal life. He has recorded it in his poem To Death, which has been translated from the Irish:
I have not gathered gold; The fame that I won perished; In love I found but sorrow That withered my life. Of wealth or of glory I shall leave nothing behind me (I think it, O God, enough!) But my name in the heart of a child.
And what vision of life had Thomas MacDonagh? We know, for it is in his poem Wishes For My Son:
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 of Saint Cecilia’s Day, I in more harmonious song Now for nearer joys should pray— Simple 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.
And we know the vision of life that Joseph Plunkett had—it was the same vision that the great mystics and the great religious had. It is in his poem I See His Blood Upon the Roses:
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.
These three men had a vision for their country that could not be expressed in a proclamation, no matter how nobly worded that proclamation might be.
Padraic Pearse gave all his thought and all his effort to bring back a chivalry to Ireland—the Heroic Age of Celtic History, when, as he said, “the greatest honor was for the hero with the most childlike heart, for the King who had the largest pity, and for the poet who visioned the truest image of beauty.” The first thing you saw when you entered his school in Cullenswood House was a fresco representing the boy Cuchullain taking arms. The Druid has warned him that the youth who takes arms that day will make his name famous, but will have a short life. And written round the fresco, in the old Irish words, was Cuchullain’s answer, “I care not if my life have only the span of a day and a night if my deeds be spoken of by the men of Ireland.” This was the spirit that Padraic Pearse sought to kindle in his boys—this was the spirit that he tried to bring back again into Ireland.
Thomas MacDonagh strove to create an Ireland that would be free as his intelligence was free, as eager for deeds as he himself was eager. Those who knew MacDonagh in his literary expression thought of him as a poet with a tendency towards abstractions, as a scholar with a bent towards philology. Those who knew him intimately knew him as a man who was the best of comrades. And they knew that there was something in MacDonagh that he never expressed. What was fundamental in him was an eager search for the thing to which he could give the whole devotion of his life. He found it in his vision of the Irish Republic.
Joseph Mary Plunkett strove to bring back the spirit and the defiance of the martyrs. He came of a family whose name has been in Irish history for six hundred years. The proudest memory of his people was the memory of martyrdom. The last priest martyred in England—the Venerable Oliver Plunkett—was of his blood.
These men, with their comrades—the good and brave Connolly, who gave all of his will and all of his ability to the workers of Ireland, the upright Eamonn Ceant, the soldierly O’Rahilly, the adventurous MacBride, Shaun MacDermott, “kindly Irish of the Irish,” and the others—have done a great thing for our country at this great moment of history.
They have made Ireland not a British question but a European question.
They have shown us that the country should be redeemed by the heroic spirit as well as by the political intelligence.
They have belittled danger and death for generations of Irish nationalists.