Some Poems of Roger Casement

Roger Casement
1918
Printed at the talbot press 89 Talbot Street Dublin


In giving these few poems of Roger Casement to the Irish people I do not claim for them any special value as Irish literature. Roger Casement was not a poet, he would have been the last to lay claim to any such title, but, like the greater part of his fellow-countrymen, he felt from time to time the impulse to express some particular thought in verse, and he used to jot down, sometimes in a letter to a friend, sometimes on an odd half sheet of paper, the thought clothed in a poetic form just as it came into his mind.
His was a nature of peculiar delicacy and refinement and of singular simplicity; he had but one passion, Ireland, but one deep sympathy—compassion for the helpless and oppressed.
Even as a little boy he turned with horror and revulsion from cruelty of every description: he would tenderly nurse a wounded bird to life, and stop to pity an overloaded horse. This gentleness and tender-heartedness was one of his most marked characteristics; it led him to champion the cause of the Congo native and the Putumayo Indian, and to spend his slender means in later life in trying to relieve the wretched fever-stricken inhabitants in Connemara when typhus was raging among them, or to provide a mid-day meal for children in the Gaeltacht, who after walking perhaps for miles to school, through storm and rain, would have gone hungry all day if his kindly heart had not pitied them. When he was stricken with misfortune, it was these same children whose touching letters to him and whose words of consolation, with their prayers, brought tears to his eyes.
The act which brought him to his death was the result of long years of brooding over Ireland and her destiny; it was not a sudden and new impulse as some have endeavoured to prove. To say that his interest in Ireland began with his retirement from the service of the British Foreign Office is to misrepresent the facts entirely. Roger Casement from his earliest days was before everything else a lover of Ireland. In his school days he begged from the aunt, with whom he spent his holidays, for possession of an attic room which he turned into a little study, and the writer remembers the walls papered with cartoons cut out of the Weekly Freeman , showing the various Irish Nationalists who had suffered imprisonment at English hands for the sake of their belief in Ireland a Nation. Many years later, when he himself was a prisoner in an English gaol he wrote: I have felt this destiny on me since I was a little boy; it was inevitable; everything in my life has led up to it. He seemed in a curious way to have a foreboding of his fate. Once, years before his retirement, he was joking with a friend about some wonderful plan that was conceived in a mood of playfulness, and the carrying out of which would have involved considerable danger. The friend pointed out that the disadvantage of it all lay in the fact that they might accidentally kill someone, and then, she added, we'd be hanged. Roger Casement was silent for a moment, his deepset eyes fixed on an invisible goal, and then he said very quietly, I think I shall be hanged for Ireland. A friend tells me that later he made a similar observation to a man who spoke of old rebellions and the fate of their leaders, I shall be hanged, too, for leading an attack on Dublin Castle.