Patrick Pearse Poet and IRISH Revolutionary

IN THE TRADITION OF THE  CELTIC BARDS


The American poet Joyce Kilmer  known best for his poem TREES was  moved by the extraordinary  sacrifice of so many poets in the Easter Rising in Dublin 1916

Pearse and his companions, of course, had at a stroke joined the romantic heroes of revolutions past. The American journalist and poet Joyce Kilmer, who was Joseph Plunkett’s friend, had a remarkable grasp of Irish revolutionary history and wrote an extensive article on the Rising in the magazine of The New York Times, “Poets March in the Van of Irish Revolt”. His poem, Easter Week In Memory of Joseph Mary Plunkett, places Pearse squarely in the company of the mythic heroes:

Lord Edward leaves his resting place

And Sarsfield’s face is glad and fierce,

See Emmet leap from troubled sleep

To grasp the hand of Pádraic Pearse!

Kilmer imagines the  heroes of repeated Irish struggles over  centuries  past  leaping from their graves to welcome the new hero --Pearse,

Pearse was a recognized poet and school master. He  has a great empathy and imagines how a mother feels at the loss of her children in  battle.  He captures the struggle between sadness  and pride in their bravery. Her pride for her  sons triumphs .
A prophetic poem perhaps about his own mother
and his brother“The Mother”--

I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge

My two strong sons that I have seen go out
To break their strength and die, they and a few,
In bloody protest for a glorious thing,
They shall be spoken of among their people,
The generations shall remember them,
And call them blessed; 
But I will speak their names to my own heart
In the long nights; 
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth.
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in their coming and their going; 
And tho' I grudge them not, I weary, weary
Of the long sorrow-And yet I have my joy:
My sons were faithful, and they fought.

Pearse and his little army that had practiced on
Dublin streets to public ridicule made him
sensitive to the need for blood sacrifice to rouse
the derisive, skeptical and despairing Irish public:
inured to years of colonial occupation and abuse.
After a week, the Easter rising was suppressed and
the stream of Irish martyrs began again.

Pearse would be one of 16 men executed for
their part in the EASTER RISING.
His last night in prison before his execution,
Pearse wrote a poem that shows that he was
coming to realize the meaning of death and his
own loss of life:

The Wayfarer

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening,
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gate of Heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy.
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.

Pearse understood the seeming foolishness of
Irish revolt and historical struggle against terrible
odds. The sacrifice needed to liberate Ireland was
in his mind comparable to the sacrifice of
Jesus Christ in the face of the might of the
Roman Empire
Pearse’s poem about the sacred folly of Irish
patriotism,

“The Fool”

Since the wise men have not spoken, I speak

that am only a fool; 
A fool that hath loved his folly,
Yea, more than the wise men their books
or their counting houses or their quiet homes,
Or their fame in men's mouths; 
A fool that in all his days hath done never
a prudent thing,
Never hath counted the cost, nor reckoned
if another reaped
The fruit of his mighty sowing, content
to scatter the seed; 
A fool that is unrepentant, and that soon
at the end of all
Shall laugh in his lonely heart as the ripe ears
fall to the reaping-hooks
And the poor are filled that were empty,
Tho' he go hungry.
I have squandered the splendid years
that the Lord God gave to my youth
In attempting impossible things,
deeming them alone worth the toil. .

Was it folly or grace? Not men shall judge me,

but God.
I have squandered the splendid years:

Lord, if I had the years I would squander them

over again,
Aye, fling them from me! 
For this I have heard in my heart, that a man
shall scatter, not hoard,
Shall do the deed of to-day, nor take thought
of to-morrow's teen,
Shall not bargain or huxter with God;
or was it a jest of Christ's
And is this my sin before men,
to have taken Him at His word? 
The lawyers have sat in council,
the men with the keen, long faces,
And said, `This man is a fool,'
and others have said, `He blasphemeth; '

And the wise have pitied the fool

that hath striven to give a life
In the world of time and space
among the bulks of actual things,
To a dream that was dreamed in the heart,
and that only the heart could hold.

O wise men, riddle me this:
what if the dream come true?

What if the dream come true?

and if millions unborn shall dwell
In the house that I shaped in my heart,
the noble house of my thought? 
Lord, I have staked my soul,

I have staked the lives of my kin
On the truth of Thy dreadful word.

Do not remember my failures,
But remember this my faith
And so I speak.
Yea, ere my hot youth pass,

I speak to my people and say:
Ye shall be foolish as I;

ye shall scatter, not save; 
Ye shall venture your all,

lest ye lose what is more than all; 
Ye shall call for a miracle,

taking Christ at His word.
And for this I will answer,
O people, answer here and hereafter,
O people that I have loved,
shall we not answer together? 

Taking Christ at His Word is still probably
the most radical thing that any of us can do.

It is one definition of what a makes a saint a saint.