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If in my childhood I had been asked to give the nameof an Irish poem, I should certainly have said “LetErin remember the days of old,” or “Richand rare were the gems she wore”; for althoughamong the ornamental books that lay on the round drawingroomtable, the only one of Moore’s was LallaRookh, some guest would now and then sing oneof his melodies at the piano; and I can remember vexingor trying to vex my governess by triumphant mentionof Malachi’s collar of gold, she no doubt aswell as I believing the “proud invader”it was torn from to have been, like herself, an Englishone. A little later I came to know other verses, ballads nearer to the tradition of the country than Moore’sfaint sentiment. For a romantic love of country hadawakened in me, perhaps through the wide beauty ofmy home, from whose hillsides I could see the mountainof Burren and Iar Connacht, and at sunset the silverwestern sea; or it maybe through the half revealedsympathy of my old nurse for the rebels whose cheeringshe remembered when the French landed at Killala in’98; or perhaps but through the natural breakingof a younger child of the house from the conservatismof her elders. So when we were taken sometimes as atreat the five mile drive to our market town, Loughrea,I would, on tiptoe at the counter, hold up the sixpence earned by saying without a mistake my Biblelesson on the Sunday, and the old stationer, lookingdown through his spectacles would give me what I wantedsaying that I was his best customer for Fenian books;and one of my sisters, rather doubtfully consentingto my choice of The Spirit of the Nationfor a birthday present, qualified the gift by copyinginto it “Patriotism is the last refuge of ascoundrel.” I have some of them by me yet, thelittle books in gay paper or in green cloth, and someverses in them seem to me no less moving than in thoseearly days, such as Davis’s lament.
We thought you would not die, wewere sure you
would not go
And leave us in our utmost need to Cromwell’s
cruel blow;
Sheep without a shepherd when the snow shuts out
the sky,
O why did you leave us Owen? Why did you die?
And if some others are little more than a catalogue,unmusical, as:—
Now to begin to name them I’llcontinue in a direct
line,
There’s John Mitchell, Thomas Francis Meagher
and also William Smith O’Brien;
John Martin and O’Donoghue, Erin sorely feels
their loss,
And to complete their number I will include
O’Donovan Ross—
yet there is in them a certain dignity, an intensity born of continuity of purpose; they are roughly hammeredlinks in a chain of unequal workmanship, but stretchingback through the centuries to the Munster poets ofthe days of Elizabeth, advised by Spenser to harrythem out of Ireland. The names change from age to age,that is all. The verses of the seventeenth centuryhallow those of MacCarthys and Fitzgeralds who foughtfor the Stuarts or “knocked obedience out ofthe Gall”; the eighteenth ended with the rebelsof ’98; the nineteenth had Emmet and Mitchelland its Manchester martyrs. Already in these earlydays of the twentieth the street singers cry out:
Mac Dermott, Mallin, Hanrahan, Daly,Colbert
and Mac Bride
All men who for our country’s cause have nobly
bled and died.
Even Yeats, fa