(For the unveiling, 1st October, 1911)
Tears will betray all pride, but when ye mourn him,
Be it in soldier wise;
As for a captain who hath gently borne him,
And in the midnight dies.
Fewness of words is best; he was too great
For ours or any phrase.
Love could not guess, nor the slipped hound of hate
Track that soul's secret ways.
Signed with a sign, unbroken, unrevealed,
His Calvary he trod;
So let him keep, where all world-wounds are healed
The silences of God.
Yet is he Ireland's too: a flaming coal
Lit at the stars, and sent
To burn the sin of patience from her soul,
The scandal of content.
A name to be a trumpet of attack;
And, in the evil stress,
For England's iron No! to fling her back
A grim granatic Yes.
He taught us more, this best as it was last:
When comrades go apart
They shall go greatly, cancelling the past,
Slaying the kindlier heart.
Friendship and love, all clean things and unclean,
Shall be as drifted leaves,
Spurned by our Ireland's feet, that queenliest Queen
Who gives not but receives.
So freedom comes, and comes no other wise;
He gave--"The Chief"--gave well;
Limned in his blood across your clearing skies
Look up and read; Parnell!
THE HOUSE OF LORDS: AN EPITAPH
So you proscribe, and you forbid
Peace, and the trooping ghosts of hate
Enfranchise of the coffin-lid--
Your lordships' lordship speaks too late.
That word had held when yours, for you,
Thieving and reaving smote us first:
If souls were crooked, swords were true;
They took and kept because they durst.
Still, though the pride of naked swords
Passed to a meaner, stouter hand,
You said, and it was done, my lords,
Yours was the law, and yours the land.
You clove the priest, you robbed the shrine,
With spoil of Paul and Peter fat,
Brimmed altar-cups with altar-wine
To toast your new Magnificat.
The poor, who are the lords of death,
To you were mud in foundered ways;
Your sun was red Elizabeth,
Your noon, the Dutchman's Penal days.
Hunger and halters, grey despair,
Marah of exile, coastless seas,
Baal for master-minister--
You gave, my lords, and took your ease.
And then, in Paris, patience broke;
"Who is this thing that should oppress?"
Men asked: "And shall we bear his yoke.
This idle whiff of nothingness?"
That was your lordships' epitaph;
Still might you sell a nation's soul,
Spit on its tomb, and yawn and laugh,
But, thief to thief, the judgment stole.
This Ireland whom my lords despised--
Languid behind inverted thumbs--
She who believed and agonised
Leads on the loud, victorious drums.
Wave huddled wave, and now the last
Havocs your castle, built of sand--
We take the future, you the past,
Ours is the State, the Flag, the Land.
REASON IN RHYME
Will Watson, of the still unanchored art;
What random gust, what overwhelming sea
Has riven you apart
From us, and from the flagship of the free?
You whose rich phrase, and vibrant, wont to be
Trumpet and drum of onset and attack;
Who, when of Abdul's ways you stooped to sing,
Would give us just the dire, full-throated thing;
Now, when that much-damned man has got the sack,
You change your tune, and make to pipe us back
From honour, and the task of Liberty!
Why argue, though? The plain position is
You are mistaken in your premises.
You blind your sight with hot, emotional mists,
Your way of thought is greatly too morose
And moist and lachrymose,
For us, a muddled State's last realists.
We Irish, to be brief,
Are nowise grievers for the sake of grief.
I pray you, dry those sympathetic tears,
They rust the will; and, Will, your nation's sin
Is no dead shame, meet to be covered in,
But a live fact that sears.
Cancel the past? Soothly when it befalls
That ye amend the present, and are just,
Go knock your head on Dublin Castle walls:
Are they irrelevant, historic dust,
Or a hard present-tense?
Search through the large print of the Statute Book
For your much-valued Lords' benevolence,
And swept in vision westward, snatch a look
At that dim land, where hunger claims to be
The honoured guest in every family;
And the slain sun writes, in a scribble of shame,
The word of utter Hell, Clanricarde's name.
Go South and North;
Weep, if you will, along the dismal quays,
Watching the unreturning ships go forth
To fling our seed of strength and hope and worth
In far, untributary ways.
And then the soul is something--at least in verse.
Ours, poet, is to be a thing of straw,
A stained, numb thing, that sits without the law
Of yours, great master of the universe?
Most nobly planned! But, Watson, there's a text--
Done in stout English in King James's reign--
Which says that souls are not to be annexed,
Not for the whole world's gain.
Cancel the past! Why, yes! We, too, have thought
Of conflict crowned and drowned in olives of peace;
But when Cuchullin and Ferdiadh fought
There lacked no pride of warrior courtesies,
And so must this fight end.
Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease:
Free, we are free to be your friend.
And when you make your banquet, and we come,
Soldier with equal soldier must we sit,
Closing a battle, not forgetting it.
With not a name to hide,
This mate and mother of valiant "rebels" dead
Must come with all her history on her head.
We keep the past for pride:
No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb:
No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers,
No rudest man who died
To tear your flag down in the bitter years,
But shall have praise, and three times thrice again,
When at that table men shall drink with men.
ASQUITH IN DUBLIN
(AUGUST, 1912)
You stepped your steps, and the music marched, and the torches tossed
As you filled your streets with your comic Pentecost,
And the little English went by and the lights grew dim;
We, dumb in the shouting crowd, we thought of Him.
Of Him, too great for our souls and ways,
Too great for laughter or love, praise or dispraise,
Of Him, and the wintry swords, and the closing gloom--
Of Him going forth alone to His lonely doom.
No shouts, my Dublin then! Not a light nor a cry--
You kept them all till now, when the little English go by!
ULSTER