       |
See Colm Tóibín on Pearse in ‘After I am Hanged my Portrait will be Interesting: Colm Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916’, in London Review of Books (31 March 2016) - as attached. |
W. P. Ryan, The Pope’s Green Island (1912), calls Pearse ‘our boldest educational pioneer’ [181], and remarks: ‘the most courageous pioneer in the realm of Irish education is a young man of 32 [Pearse] ... educated by the Jesuits, &c’ [291-98].
Seamus O’Sullivan [James Starkey]: ‘[...] / The strange prophetic glance of Pearse, / The half-averted eyes.’ (See longer extract under O’Sullivan, supra.)
Frederick Ryan [son of the above], gives an example of ‘that metaphysical habit of regarding politics which I am afraid is one of our constitutional vices in this country’, citing Pearse’s response to his own article in The United Irishman: ‘There is here an opposition of two things which are on totally different planes - nationality and political autonomy. The Irish language is an essential of Irish nationality. It is more, it is its chief depository and safeguard. When the Irish language disappears, Irish nationality will ipso facto disappear, and for ever. Political autonomy, on the other hand, can be lost and recovered, and lost again and recovered again.... Now, if Ireland were to lose her language - which is, remember, an essential of her nationality - there might conceivably me a free state in Ireland at some future date; but that state would not be the Irish nation, for it would have parted from the body of traditions which constitute Irish nationality. The people which would give up its language in exchange for political autonomy would be like the prisoner who would sell his soul to the Evil One that he might be freed from his bodily chains.’ (An Claidheamh Soluis; quoted by Fred Ryan and rep. in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1992, Vol. 2, p.1000.)
James Stephens, The Insurrection in Dublin (1916): ‘As to Pearse, I do not know how to place him, nor what to say of him. If there was an idealist among the men concerned in this insurrection it was he, and if there was any person in the world less fitted to head an insurrection [p.91] it was he also. I never could ‘touch’ or sense in him the qualities which other men spoke of, and which made him military commandant of the rising. None of these men were magnetic in the sense that Mr. Larkin is magnetic, and I would have said that Pearse was less magnetic than any of the others. Yet it was to him and around him they clung.’
Further: ‘Men must find some centre either of power or action or intellect about which they may group themselves, and I think that Pearse became the leader because his temperament was more profoundly emotional than any of the others. He was emotional not in a flighty, but in a serious way, and one felt more that he suffered than that he enjoyed.
He had a power; men who came into intimate contact with him began to act differently to their own desires and interests. His schoolmasters did not always receive their salaries with regularity. The reason that he did not pay them was the simple one that he had no money. Given by another man this explanation would be uneconomic, but from him it was so logical that even a child could [92] comprehend it. These masters did not always leave him. They remained, marvelling perhaps, and accepting, even with stupefaction, the theory that children must be taught, but that no such urgency is due towards the payment of wages. One of his boys said there was no fun in telling lies to Mr. Pearse, for, however outrageous the lie, he always believed it. He built and renovated and improved his school because the results were good for his scholars, and somehow he found builders to undertake these forlorn hopes.
It was not, I think, that he “put his trust in God”, but that when something had to be done he did it, and entirely disregarded logic or economics or force. He said - such a thing has to be done and so far as one man can do it I will do it, and he bowed straightaway to the task.
It is mournful to think of men like these having to take charge of bloody and desolate work, and one can imagine them say, “Oh! cursed spite”, as they accepted responsibility.’ (pp.91-93.)[Quoted in part in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.282; see full-text copy in RICORSO Library > Classics > Stephens - either in this frame or in a separate window; also downloadable as a Word .doc ]
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W. B. Yeats (1): “The Statues”: ‘When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, / What stalked in the Post Office? What intellect, / What calculation, number, measurement, replied?/We Irish, born into that ancient sect/But thrown upon this filthy modern tide / And by its formless spawning fury wrecked, / Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace / The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.’ (Coll. Poems, 1950.)
| Cf., “The Death of Cuchulain |
|
W. B. Yeats (2): In “Easter 1916” Pearse, ‘our Pegasus’, ‘kept a school’. Yeats states Pearse’s sentiments thus: ‘There’s nothing but our own red blood/Can make a right Rose-tree.’ (in Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1931; Collected Poems, p.206.)
W. B. Yeats (3): Lady Gregory records that Yeats told her ‘I remember saying “Pearse is a dangerous man; he has the vertigo of self-sacrifice”.’ (Seventy Yeats: Being the Autobiography of Lady Gregory, ed. Colin Smythe, Gerrards Cross: Smythe 1974, p.549; see also IR, 22; Variorum Poems, 608.; quoted in Phillip L. Marcus, Yeats & Artistic Power, NY UP 1992; new edn. Syracuse 2001, Chap. 4, p.254 [n.22].)
W. B. Yeats (4): - “General Introduction for My Work” (1937): ‘[…] in the imagination of Pearse and his fellow soldiers the Sacrifice of the Mass had found the Red Branch in the tapestry; they went out to die calling upon Cuchulain: “Fall, Hercules, from Heaven in tempests hurled / To cleanse the beastly stable of the world’” In one sense the poets of 1916 were not of what the newspapers call my school. The Gaelic League, made timid by a modern popularisation of Catholicism sprung from the aspidistra and not from the root of Jesse, dreaded intellectual daring and stuck to dictionary and grammar. Pearse and MacDonagh and others among the executed men would have done, or [515] attempted, in Gaelic what we did or attempted in English.’ (Essays and Introductions, 1961, pp.515-16.)
| Robert Lynd - View of Pearse (summarised in Bryan Fanning, ‘Ghost Frequencies’, in Dublin Review of Books, 85 (Jan. 2017) |
[...] Pearse’s artistic reputation was, in Lynd’s view, almost entirely posthumous. Before his death he was not highly rated as a writer. Had he lived, his place in Irish literature would by no means be assured. His prose and poetry, according to Lynd, who had been a member of the Gaelic League and taught Irish language classes in London, were the work of a propagandist primarily motivated by a desire to the help the Gaelic revival. They were not the work of a genuine artist. Yet Pearse’s Collected Works had become posthumously more than just the writings of an earnest schoolmaster. His writings now seemed prophetic. Before his death he had begun “to believe in the necessity of bloodshed no less than in the necessity of the Irish language”. Lynd quoted The Singer, which closed with the hero declaring as he goes out against the Gall (the foreigners): “One man can free a people as one Man redeemed the world. I will take no pike. I will go into battle with bare hands. I will stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men on the tree!” |
| See Fanning, op. cit., in RICORSO Library > "Criticism" > Monographs - via index or as attached. |
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Arnold Bax, Farewell, My Youth (Longmans, Green 1943): P. H. Pearse [chap. section]: ‘His expression was gentle and even womanish, but his eyes were lit with the unwavering flames of the fanatic.’ (p.105.) Further: “I’m half English myself” [he said,] with the ghost of an ironic smile.’ Bax quotes Mary Colum on Pearse: ‘“Pearse want to die for Ireland, you know. It has been the ideal of his whole life”’ - and responds to events of Easter 1916, ‘I know that Pearse is behind this!’ (p.103.)
St. John Ervine, Changing Winds (Dublin: Maunsel 1917): The father of the central character, Henry Quinn, elicits from a character called John Marsh, who is modelled on Pearse, the remarks that ‘he would be glad to die for Ireland’ - to which Mr Quinn replies: ‘It ’ud be a damn sight finer to live for Ireland’ (p.65). Note also Marsh’s contention in speaking to the Northern character Arthurs that while the other is ‘establishing an Irish industry’, he is ‘helping to establish an Irish soul’ (p.135). Further, the central character advises him to ‘make a fence around his mind’, and refers to him and MacDonagh as ‘sloppy romantics’ (p.510). Henry Quinn: ‘John Marsh spent a great deal of time vilifying the English as a mean-minded people, but my God, he was only to look round the corner in Dublin, to see mean-minded people by the hundred. ( … &c.’; pp.508-09) [All cited in Richard Mills, DPhil. thesis on St. John Ervine, UUC 1997.]
AE [George Russell], The Living Torch, ed. Monk Gibbon: ‘What was in Patrick Pearse’s soul when he fought in Easter Week but an imagination, and the chief imagination which inspired him was that of a hero who stood against a host ... I who knew how deep was Pearse’s love for the Cuchulain whom O’Grady had discovered or invented, remembered Easter Week that he had been solitary against a great host in imagination with Cuchulain, long before circumstance permitted him to stand for his nation with so few companions against so great a power.’ (pp.[133-44]; quoted in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.196-97.)
“To the memory of some I knew who are dead and loved Ireland”
And yet my spirit rose in pride
Refashioning in burnished gold
The images of those who died
Or were shut up in penal cell
Here’s to you Pearse, your dream, not mine
And yet the thought - for this you fell
Has turned life’s water into wine.
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Eavan Boland, ‘Aspects of Pearse’, in Dublin Magazine (Spring 1966), quotes Pearse: ‘The English are too wise a people to attempt to educate the Irish in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us.’ On the inculcation of patriotism in the pupils of St Enda’s: ‘I do not mean that we have ever carried on anything like a political or revolutionary propaganda among the boys but simply that we have always allowed them to feel that no on can finely live who hoards life too jealously, that one must be generous in the service and withal joyous, accounting even supreme sacrifice slight.’ Boland also quotes Pearse from “The Story of a Success” - edited by Desmond Ryan, who was a pupil at St Enda’s: ‘We introduce Irish on the first day, but always in homeopathic doses, and so pleasantly presented as to appear always a pastime, and never as a task to be learned.’ Further: ‘The words and phrases of the language are always to some extent revelations of the mind of the race that has moulded the language. How often does an Irish vocable light up as with a lantern, some immemorial Irish attitude, some whole phase of Irish thought?’ Further: ‘You need not praise the Irish language - simply speak it. You need not denounce English games - play Irish ones.’ [Cont.]
Eavan Boland (‘Aspects of Pearse’, in Dublin Magazine, 1966) - cont.: ‘An Irish school need no more be a purely Irish-speaking school than an Irish nation need be a purely Irish-speaking nation; but an Irish school like an Irish nation must be permeated through and through with Irish culture, the repository of which is the Irish language.’ Boland goes on to discuss the stories and their dramatisations. The first collection of four stories, Iosagán, appeared partly in An Claidheamh Soluis, 1905-06, and in book form four years after; the second collection of six stories, An Mathair, appeared in 1916. Both have a quality of folk poetry, and the ‘almost childlike simplicity’ which he had applauded years earlier. Of Iosagán: Pearse said, ‘I have put no word, no speech into the mouths of my little boys which the real little boys of the parish I have in mind would not use in the same circumstances.’ The King - A Morality, first produced St Enda’s 1911, in the open air, ‘God has spoken through the voice of his ancient herald, the terrible, beautiful voice that comes out of the heart of battles.’ The Master and The Singer (1914 and 1915). [Cont.]
Eavan Boland (‘Aspects of Pearse’, in Dublin Magazine, 1966) - cont.: Boland calls the latter ‘the meridian of Pearse’s bravery and vision.’ (p.53); She singles out the lines in “Renunciation”: ‘I have turned my face / To the road before me / To the deed that I see / And the death I shall die’ - comparing them to the ‘somewhat stilted allegory of subjection and conquest’ and the ‘slightly barnstorming prolixity’ of other pieces. (pp.52, 53). In “The Coming Revolution” (An Claidheamh Soluis, 8 Nov. 1913), Pearse wrote: ‘We never meant to be Gaelic Leaguers and nothing more than Gaelic Leaguers. We meant to do something for Ireland, each in his own way. The Gaelic League time was to be our tutelage, but we did not intend to remain schoolboys for ever ... to every generation its deed. The deed of the generation now reached middle life was the Gaelic League. Let our generation not shirk its deed, which is to accomplish the revolution.’ [Cf. Charles Gavan Duffy.]
Eavan Boland (‘Aspects of Pearse’, in Dublin Magazine, 1966), cont. - quotes Pearse on Tone: ‘He made articulate the dumb voices of the centuries; he gave Ireland a clear and precise and worthy concept of Nationality. Be he did more than this, not only did he define Irish nationalism but he armed his generation in defence of it. Thinker and doer, dreamer of the immortal dream and doer of the immortal deed, we owe to this dead man more than we can ever repay.’ (p.55). On 9 March 1914, Pearse addressed a rally in New York, the speech afterwards being printed as part of “How Does She Stand?”: ‘We can accept no settlement as final which does not “break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils”.’ Boland remarks: ‘without a doubt the most dazzling section of Pearse’s political work, perhaps of all his writing, is “From a Hermitage”.... the essential Pearse ... written June 1913 to January 1914, it sketched his developing militancy.’ (See further under Boland, Quotations, infra.)
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Denis Johnston: in his Introduction to The Scythe and the Sunset, in Johnston remarked on the curious promotion of Pearse to Commander in Chief during the fighting in 1916. (See Collected Plays and rep. edn. in Dublin Magazine, Spring 1966.)
Fr. Francis Shaw, SJ, ‘The Canon of Irish History - A Challenge’, in Studies: An Irish Qaurterly Review LXI, 242 (Summer 1972): ‘Pearse was a man of complex character. [...] His ideas on education were stimulating and, for Ireland at least, novel. He was [120] neither profound in his thinking nor was he for the most part original. Thsi is peculiarly true of his political philosoph. In his earlier years the Gaelic Leauge stimulated an interest in the Irish language and in the culture and tradition enshrined in it. Pearse was especially attracted by the folk-songs which the work of Hyde at the time was making known. To judge by his writings Pearse’s knowledge of the Gaelic past of the country was slight rather than profound. The three addresses to the Irish literary society which he delivered in 1897 and 1898, and which were later printed, are not of much import; they are rhetorical and immature. In the fashion of his time he made many exaggerated and uncritical claims for Irish literature, and he created for himself a highly romantic image of early Ireland which had only a slight relation to reality. In the course of his life Pearse’s political views changed considerably; in the last three or four years of his life the rate of change accelerated rapidly. The progress was from moderate nationalism to extreme republicanism and separatist. One feels that by temperament Pearse was conservative. In his religious beliegs he was strongly traditionalist. He was a revolutionary malgré lui. He wrote fiery words about shooting people; but he did not himself use any weapon; and we would be surprised if he had. It is not difficult to discover the sources of Pearse’s later political thinking. He makes it clear himself that he had nothing new to offer. He declares without qualification that on the subject of Irish nationalism everything that needed to be said had already been said. To use his own words, what he called “the gospel of Irish nationalism” had its canon and its canonical writers. These were the “four evangelists” of Irish nationalism, Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, Fintan Lalor and John Mitchel. [...]’ (pp.120-21.) [Note: There is no paragraph break in the above.]
Cont. [Fr. Francis Shaw, ‘The Canon of Irish History - A Challenge’ (1972) ‘In 1916 it must have been apparent that separation could only divide the nation more deeply. Even the most moderate measure of Home Rule for the whole country was wholly unacceptable to the Carson-led Ulstermen. [...] It is difficult to find anything which throws light on Pearse’s mind at the this time about the effect of the Rising on the unity of Ireland. Both the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Volunteers were pledged to avoid any anction which would cause disunity. On the fall of the dice which was cast in 1916, there were different possibilities, but amongst them the unity of Ireland did not figure.’ (Ibid., p.122.) Further: ‘Pearse, one feels, would not have been satisfied to attain independence by peaceful means.’ (Ibid., p.149.)
[Note: Fr. Shaw’s article was written in 1966 at the time of the Fiftieth-Anniversary Celebrations of the Rising, and was deemed unsuitable to print at that date. See further quotations from under James Connolly [q.v.] and Wolfe Tone [q.v.]. (See also remarks quoted by Declan Kiberd, infra.)
Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Ireland (Cambridge UP 1973), pp.141-48, ‘Patrick Pearse’ [also printed in Revising the Rising, eds. Máirín Ní Donnchadha and Theo Dorgan, 1991], quotes Pearse: ‘I am glad then, that the North has begun.’ [&c.; as infra.] I am glad that the Orangemen have armed for it is a goodly thing to see arms in Irish hands. I would like to see the A.O.H. armed. I would like to see the Transport Workers armed. I would like to see any and every body of Irish citizens armed. We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but the bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing and a nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them.’ Further, ‘The Orangeman is ridiculous in so far as he believes incredible things, he is estimable in so far as he is willing and able to fight in defence of what he believes.’ (ibid.) Further quotes: ‘I challenge again the Irish psychology of the man who sets up the Gael and the Palesman as opposing forces with conflicting outlooks [...] he who would segregate Irish history and Irish men into two sections - Irish speaking and English speaking - is not helping towards achieving Ireland a Nation.’ (ibid.)
Lee remarks that Pearse envisaged forming an opposition party under Home rule (ibid., p.155), and writes further: ‘And however profusely blood sacrifice sentiments spatter the latter writings of Pearse and MacDonagh, and however retrospectively relevant they appeared to be in the circumstances, it seems unhistorical to interpret these sentiments as the basis of the actual planning of the Rising.’ (Ibid., p.25.)
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Patrick Sheeran (Novels of Liam O’Flaherty, Wolfhound Press 1976), comments on the element of liebestod in Liam O’Flaherty ’s novels Insurrection and The Martyr: ‘[T]he theme of death-in-love as it is revealed in Tristram and Iseuld [sic], in Romeo and Juliet, in Heloise and Abelard has to do with personal relationships, in the fate of lovers who refuse to live except by the best they have known and choose death rather than a diminution of their great passion (an Anglo-Irish example would be Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows). An Ireland variously personified as Kathleen ni Houlihan, Roisin Dubh, Banba, seems to inspire in her devotees a similar dark passion. The young girl with the walk of a queen is part of the impenetrable quality of much nationalist rhetoric, whether in the writings of Pearse or the imaginative [244] works of O’Flaherty, that what is said is not couched in political terms, often not even nationalistic, but mystical. [...] The images and the terminology of sexual love are here displaced from their more normal personal context to a public one, often with grotesques effect.’ (Op. cit., pp.243-44.) Sheeran quotes the passage in Insurrection devoted to the reading of the Proclamation: ‘All eyes were turned towards the Grecian columns of [240] the portico, where Patrick Pearse stood ready to proclaim the purpose of the insurrection. The people were now like an audience at a theatre, tensely waiting for the climax of a play’s first act.’ (O’Flaherty, Insurrection, 1950; quoted in Sheeran, op. cit. 1976, pp.24-41; see further under Liam O’Flaherty.)
Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse, The Triumph of Failure (NY: Toplinger 1977): ‘He wrote, acted and died for a people that did not exist; he distorted into his own image the ordinary people of Ireland, who lacked his own remarkable qualities, but who had perceptions and complexities of their own that he could never understand.’ (p.343; quoted in James Fairhall, James Joyce and The Question of History, Cambridge UP 1993; and note, Edwards, another edn., London 1977.)
Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal: The Irish Revolution in Literature from Parnell to the Death of W. B. Yeats 1891-1939 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1977), comments and quotations [as infra, passim] culminating in the remark: ‘It has been argued that the Rising was an unnecessary act of violence. Home Rule had been achieved. A government in Dublin at the end of the Great War would have been in a position to have realised whatever further freedoms the elected representatives of the people wanted: either the Commonwealth status of Canada and Australia, or complete independence. Yet this excursion into comic opera revolution (as it seemed to the British) by a very small and unrepresentative minority would completely alter the political nature of Sinn Féin, alter indeed the whole life of the country for the next decade. In the end it was the course of events unleashed by the Rising which ensured the partition of Ireland. Despite Pearse’s declared concern for the Northern people, it was this resort to revolution as a means of change that copper-fastened the divisions in Ireland. The question of allegiance to the Republic was later to be the source of further divisions and further bloodshed.’ (p.90.)
Dervla Murphy, A Place Apart (London: Routledge 1978), writes: ‘Would we have been deprived of anything worthwhile had Easter Week never happened? Certainly we would have gained a lot had the fifteen leaders of the Rising lived their normal life-span as co-architects of the New Ireland. Patrick Pearse, for instance, had founded his own schools because he believed that the Irish educational system was a “murder machine”, that teachers should “keep in touch with educational thought in other lands”, and that education should be all about the development of the individual personality. He urged “Freedom to the individual school, freedom to the individual teacher, freedom as far as may be to the individual pupil”. And at St. Enda’s he proved it possible to run a school efficiently while putting those theories into practice. / In 1912 Pearse had accepted the emasculated third Home [30] Rule bill, largely because it gave Ireland control of her own education system. But for the attitude of the Ulster Unionists, he and many others would almost certainly have remained resigned to Home Rule and never been myth-makers. Not everyone remembers now that the violence that ravaged Ireland between 1916 and 1923 began as a reaction to the establishment in Ulster of a private army of 100,000 men. The Ulster Unionists - themselves and two non-Ulstermen, Carson and Bonar Law - had shown the way.’ (pp.30-31.)
See also her remarks: ‘Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the Irish Volunteers had staged an ill-organised uprising in Dublin on 23 April 1916 I use the word “staged” deliberately, for to me it seems that the Easter Week Rebellion was an exercise in planned myth-making. [...] In January 1916 Pearse could not have recruited for his cause one-tenth of the numbers who were proud and eager to help Britain defend poor Catholic Belgium. By mid-May, when fifteen of the insurgent leaders had been shot in Kilmainham Goal after trial by court-martial, the public attitude had changed dramatically.’ (Dervla Murphy, op. cit., p.28.)
Richard Kearney, ‘Myth and Terror’, in The Crane Bag, 2. 1&2 (1978), pp.273-87, rep. in Crane Bag Book (1982), pp.273-87, quotes Pearse writing to his mother before his execution: ‘not to grieve for all this but to think of it as a sacrifice’. Included in that letter is his poem, “A Mother Speaks”, in which he patently identifies with Christ ‘who had gone forth to die for men’ and compares his mother’s faith in his powers of renewal with Mary’s faith in the resurrection, ‘Dear Mary, I have shared thy sorrow and soon shall share thy Joy’. In his play The Singer, MacDara exclaims: ‘I will stand up before the Gaul as Christ hung naked before men on a tree’; in his surrender statement Pearse said that if the Irish had lost their victory ‘they would win it in death’ (p.275). Note: Kearney quotes Conor Cruise O’Brien on Pearse in States of Ireland [as given in O’Brien, Quotations, infra.]
Declan Kiberd, ‘Writers in Quarantine?: The Case for Irish Studies’, in Crane Bag, 3, 1 (1979), pp.9-21; rep. in Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (Dublin: Blackwater Press 1982), pp.341-53: Kiberd takes Pearse as an example of the exclusionist mentality adopted by language-revivalists towards the literary revival; argues that the achievement of J. M. Synge was to overcome the ‘foolish division’ between the English and Irish writing contemporaneously ‘decreed by Pearse’; (p.342); he suggests that Pearse would have adopted a more pluralist attitude had he lived. (Idem.)
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Declan Kiberd, ‘Editorial’, The Crane Bag: Journal of Irish Studies, 5, 2 (1981): ‘Pearse had grasped the essential connection between language and politics, but the failure to concede this point lost the League much support in the years after Rebellion. Pearse had preached that the Gaeltacht could never survive on tourism alone, but a massive programme of industrial development was necessary: “the language, the industries, and the very existence of the people are all interdependent and whoever has a living care for the one cannot be unmindful of the other.” But the League, in its anxiety to woo Protestants and to avoid political division, would not allow itself to be turned into a political party. In the wake of the Parnell split and in the face of continuing sectarian bitterness in the north, this caution was understandable. / In a broader sense, however, Pearse was right. […] little would be achieved without the support of a native government in Dublin.’ (Rep. in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, 1982, pp.835-37; p.825.)
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape 1995); material on Pearse includes the following citations: ‘What was in Patrick Pearse’s soul when he fought in Easter Week but an imagination, and the chief imagination which inspired him was that of a hero who stood against a host ... I who knew how deep was Pearse’s love for the Cuchulain whom O’Grady had discovered or invented, remembered Easter Week that he had been solitary against a great host in imagination with Cuchulain, long before circumstance permitted him to stand for his nation with so few companions against so great a power.’ (AE [George Russell], The Living Torch, ed. Gibbon, pp.134-44; Kiberd 196-97]; Pearse, ‘O wise men, riddle me this: what if the dream come true?/What if the dream come true? and millions unborn shall dwell / In the house that I shaped with my heart, the noble house of my thought?’ (Plays, Stories, and Poems, 1924, p.336; Kiberd, p.200); also, ‘One man can free a people as one man redeemed the world. I will take no pike. I will go into battle with bare hands. I will stand up before the Gall as Christ hung naked before men on a tree.’ (‘The Singer’; Plays, [&c.], p.44; Kiberd, p.201); “The Memory of Some I Knew who are Dead and who Loved Ireland”, poem, in The Irish Times (Dec. 1917): ‘I listened to high from you, / Thomas MacDonagh, and it seemed, / The words were idle, but they grew / To nobleness by death redeemed’; also, ‘Equal the sacrifice may weigh / Dear Kettle of the generous heart’. [Printed in Edwards and Pyle, Easter Rising, p.220; Kiberd, 240].
Declan Kiberd (Inventing Ireland, 1995) - cont.: Kiberd retells the story of Russell orating on the return of ancient heroes on Bray Esplanade in the hearing of Standish James O’Grady (op. cit., p.196). Quotes from Pearse’s “Mise Éire”: ‘I have turned my face ... &c. [Thugas mo ghnúis / ar an ród seo romham, / ar an gníomh, / is ar an mbás a gheobhad.’ [Kiberd, 208].
Kiberd Quotes Fr. Francis Shaw: ‘Objectively the equation of the patriot with Christ is in conflict with the whole Christian tradition, and, indeed, with the explicit teaching of Christ.’ (Studies, Summer 1971, p.123; Kiberd, p.211); Nic Shubhlaigh called Pearse - without defection or animus - ‘a bit of a poseur’ [The Splendid Years, p.145; Kiberd, 224]; Pearse: No private right to property is good against he public right of the nation. But the nation is under a moral obligation so to exercise its public right as to secure strictly equal rights and liberties to every man and woman within the nation.’ (Political Writings, 1924, p.376); Kiberd further comments that, in the treatment of the O’Donovan Rossa speech in Act III of The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey, ‘Pearse’s sanguinary rhetoric is divorced from its context in order to heighten its ferocity, but it was all too typical of its time. (Kiberd, p.230).
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D. G. Boyce,‘Separatism and the Irish National Tradition’, in Colin H. Williams, ed., National Separatism (Cardiff: Wales UP 1982), p.75: ‘“Ireland’s historical claim is for Separation. Ireland has authorised no man to abate that claim.’ (Political Writings and Speechs, 1918; Dublin 1966, pp.231.) Here, with his characteristic rhetorical flourish, Patrick Pearse expounded one of the most pervasive and lasting of the many myths surrounding Irish nationalism: that “the Irish who opposed the landing of the English in 1169 were Separatists”; that “the twelve generations of the Irish nation [...] who maintained a winning fight against English domination in Ireland were separatist generations”; that “up to 1691, Ireland was Separatist”; and that separatism was “the national position”.’ (Ibid., pp.232, 233, 234, 238.) Pearse’s judgement was not only historically dubious; it conveniently overlooked the fact that he himself regarded the 1912 home rule bill, which offered a limited form of devolution to Ireland, as a satisfactory settlement, proving that England kept the faith and gave effect to its promises. But to Pearse, and to many who followed him, any Irish nationaoist who was not a separatist, Like Henry Grattan, Daniel O’Connell, or John Redmond, was not really a nationalist in Irish political terms [...].’ (Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure, 1977, p.155.) Further, ‘Pearse’s reading of Irish history was tendentious; but his myth of the eternal separatist struggle, like so many historical myths, contained certain grains of truth. It was straining credulity to maintain that a nationally united Ireland had existed from the arrival of the Gaels, for Ireland, with its conglomeration of independent kingdoms, its local rivalries and patriotisms, its lack of a national heartland, its topographical fragmentation easily drew the comment that ‘the Irish were a byword for their prolonged failure to create an effective united state’ [E. Estyn Evans]. This patchwork of Irish political institutions, the dynastic sub-kingdoms, the net of local supremacies, were, however, altering by the twelfth century, and the High-Kingship of Ireland, whiles still too weak to resist external threat or resurgence of localism in Ireland itself, was becoming the focus of political life. But more significant was the saga literature of Ireland which grew from this series of dynastic struggles [...] In it Irish history was depicted - not for the last time - as a struggle against foreigners (in this case the Norsemen) which reached a triumphal climax with the rise of the royal house of Dal Cas and the career of Brian [Boru].’ (p.75-76.)
Seamus Deane, Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea [Field Day Pamphlet, No. 4] (Derry: Field Day 1984): ‘It would be perfectly appropriate, within this particular frame, to take a poem by Pearse - say, The Rebel -and to read it in the light of a story - the Republican tradition from Tone, the Celtic tradition from Cuchulainn, the Christian tradition from Colmcille - and then reread the story as an expression of the moral supremacy of martyrdom over oppression. But as a poem, it would be regarded as inferior to that of Yeats. Yeats, stimulated by the moribund state [6] of the Ascendancy tradition, resolves, on the level of literature, a crisis which, for him, cannot be resolved socially or politically. In Pearse’s case, the poem is no more than an adjunct to political action. The revolutionary tradition he represents is not broken by oppression but renewed by it. His symbols survive outside the poem, in the Cuchulainn statue, in the reconstituted GPO, in the military behaviour and rhetoric of the IRA. Yeats’s symbols have disappeared, the destruction of Coole Park being the most notable, although even in their disappearance one can discover reinforcement for the tragic condition embodied in the poem. The unavoidable fact about both poems is that they continue to belong to history and to myth; they are part of the symbolic procedures which characterise their culture. Yet, to the extent that we prefer one as literature to the other, we find ourselves inclined to dispossess it of history, to concede to it an autonomy which is finally defensible only on the grounds of style.’ (pp.6-7.) [Cont.]
Seamus Deane, Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea (1984) - cont. ‘Yeats was indeed our last romantic in literature as was Pearse in politics. They were men who asserted a coincidence between the destiny of the community and their own and believed that this coincidence had an historical repercussion. This was the basis for their belief in a “spiritual aristocracy which worked its potent influence in a plebeian world. Their determination to restore vitality to this lost society provided their culture with a millennial conviction which has not yet died.’ Whatever we may thing of their ideas of tradition, we still adhere to the tradition of the idea that art and revolution are definitively associated in their production of any individual style [12] which is also the signature of the community’s deepest self. [ … &c.]’ (pp.12-13.)
Seamus Deane, ‘Writing and Chivalry’, in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980, (LOndon: Faber 1985): ‘Much of his persuasive strength lies in the rich vocabulary of baptism, vocation, holiness, prophecy, service and martyrdom.’ (p.69; quoted in Callum Boyle, PG Diss. Essay, UU 2004.)
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Richard Kearney, Myth and Motherland [Field Day Pamphlet No. 5] (Derry: Field Day Co. 1984): ‘In the name of national Revival, Pearse sought a return to the foundational myths of our identity, to a sense of rootedness in the past which would allow us to make the break with the “alien” culture of colonial Britain which had uprooted and alienated us from our original sense of ourselves. These foundational myths, which would enable the orphaned child to return to the security of its maternal origins, were identified by Pearse in a positive sense with the three mothers of our historical memory: the mother church of the Catholic revival; the [18] motherland of the nationalist revival; and the mother-tongue of the Gaelic revival. In the opening and closing sentences of the Easter Proclamation of 1916, for example, we find an implicit conflation of these revival idioms. [...] Elsewhere Pearse is more explicit in his conjugation of the Catholic and mythological idioms of martyrs sacrificing themselves for the sake of the Eternal Mother. In his farewell poem from his death cell in Kilmainham, he identifies his own martyrdom with that of Christ who also “had gone forth to die for men”. His poem is appropriately entitled ‘A Mother Speaks’ [... .] It is within this mythic context of sons self-sacrificing themselves for the motherland that we must understand Pearse’s enigmatic claim that “bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing” and that “life springs from death”. (p.18.)
Dáithí Ó hÓgáin, The Hero in Irish Folk History (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1985) [Conclusion]: ‘Perhaps the most passionate appeal to the past, shrewdly anticipating the future, was made by Pádraic Pearse, who had a good acquaintance with both literary and oral sources: / “I am come of the seed of the people, / The people that sorrow, / That have no treasure but hope, / No riches laid up but a memory / Of an ancient glory ...”. Here again we encounter the image of one who both represents and speaks for the people - a favourite theme with Pearse, who in his own case carried the idea to its logical conclusion. It is important to stress, however, that Pearse’s messianism did not derive from oral tradition, but rather from political and philosophical reflection. Even when expressed in dramatic form, the idea that one man must be sacrificed for the people, his allusions were usually to the literary image of Cúchulainn and the theological image of Christ rather than to the figures of folk narrative.’ (p.318.)
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Allen Lane 1988), incls. bibl. note: ‘there are few worthwhile biographies of the period, one glowing exception being Ruth Dudley Edward’s Triumph &c (1977). Also cites Francis Shaw, S. J., ‘The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge’, Studies LXI (Summer 1972), pp.113-52, of which: ‘written for 1966, it was not seen fit to publish the essay until six years after. The chief charge against Pearse is the blasphemy of appropriating the Christian symbolism of Easter for the militant politics of Fenian Republicanism. Fr. Shaw remarks, “Pearse, one feels, would not have been satisfied to attain independence by peaceful means.”’ (p.149).
Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (Allen Lane 1993), remarks on the congruence of ‘Gaelic’ and ‘Catholic’ in Pearse; further, ‘Not only Pearse’s youthful Three Lectures on Gaelic Topics (1897-98), but all he wrote and taught up to his execution in 1916 owed far more to John Mitchel and the Library of Ireland than to the researches of Eoin MacNeill, whose path-breaking lectures on early Irish society were delivered in 1904 ... Pearse’s use of history was that of a calculatedly disingenuous propagandist [that] enabled him, for instance, to so thoroughly misinterpret Thomas Davis.’ (p.14).
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Brian P. Murphy, Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal (Dublin: James Duffy 1992), writes: ‘the group which argued most firmly and consistently for the ideals of Easter Week and the Republic was that associated with Count Plunkett, Cathal Brugha, Father O’Flanagan, and J. J. O’Kelly - not the groupings which rallied around de Valera, Collins, or Griffith’.
Eugene McCabe, Selected Poems of Patrick Pearse (1993), Preface: ‘Christ is not a national leader and will not be drawn into political dispute, whereas political passion and dispute is what pearse is all about. This makes it well-night impossible to separate the poetry from this vision of himself as a latter-day blend of Christ and the noble warrior Gael.’ (q.p.; quoted in Joseph Lynch, MA diss., UU 2003.)
Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ancestral Voices: Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Dublin: Poolbeg 1994), quoting Pearse at Wolfe Tone’s grave, Bodenstown Co. Kildare, 22 June 1913: ‘We have come to the holiest place in Ireland; holier even than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down. Patrick brought us life, but this mean died for us. He was the greatest of Irish Nationalists ... We have come to renew our adhesion to the faith of Tone, to express once more our full acceptance of the gospel of Irish Nationalism which he was the first to formulate in worldly terms. This man’s soul was a burning flame, so ardent so generous so pure, that to come into communion with it is to come unto a new baptism, into a new regeneration and cleansing.’ (Coll. Works, Political Writings and Speeches Phoenix n.d., pp.58-62; cited in O’Brien, Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Poolbeg 1994), p.98ff.
| Further Further (Ancestral Voices, 1994) - cont:. |
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Liam de Paor, ‘The Great War’, Landscapes with Figures (Dublin: Four Courts 1998): ‘Pearse’s language and imagery did not in fact represent the republican nationalist tradition, but were borrowed from the language and imagery of the imperial tradition of the day. It appealed to other republicans, because one of their tactics was to turn the ideological weapons of the imperialists back on themselves. Pearse could speak the language of the enemy: this was one of the reasons he was chosen, not so long before 1916, by those who planned the revolution, to be a spokesman and leader. The same qualities which appealed to them and suggested him as a suitable figurehead are the qualities which have made him, par excellence, the representative and symbol of the Rising: his rhetoric of resurrection after blood sacrifice became for a long time the received version of what the Rising was. But this was, to a large extent, the rhetoric and imagery of the Great War, of which, in one aspect, the Easter Rising was a minor but significant episode.’ (p.146.)
Elaine Sisson, Pearse’s Patriots: St. Enda’s and the Cult of Boyhood (Dublin: Four Court’s Press 2004): ‘The emergent forms of cultural nationalism in literature, language, music, art, drama and sport come together and are most powerfully articulated as an inter-dependent web of ideas in a school environment. St Enda’s is a perfect example of how these fragile and emerging forms of national revival were condensed, taught and then redisplayed to a wider nationalist community who understood the school as a microcosm of what a nation state could be.’ (p.4.) ‘[...] in its heyday, St. Enda’s captured the imagination of the wider nationalist population in a particularly overwhelming fashion.’ Quotes Roger Casement, W. P. Ryan and Desmond Ryan (who wrote that at St. Enda’s Pearse taught ‘not only his pupils but a nation’) and even Lord Alfred Douglas, who quoted William Bulfin in maintaining that St. Enda’s was ‘the most important thing in the interests of Gaelic nationality that had been done in Ireland since the foundation of the Gaelic League.’ Sisson’s book argues that St. Enda’s was ‘more than a radical experiment in schooling; it was, in Pearse’s words, “an educational adventure” which operated as an instrumental training ground in national identity and masculinity.’ (p.5.) Sisson sensitively discusses Pearse’s attraction to boys and the question of his sexuality, dismissing the stories of an early romantic heartbreak occasioned by the drowning of Eibhlín Nicolls, and considers on the evidence that it is ‘inappropriate to consider him to have been a gay man in the sense that is now commonly understood.’ (pp.139-40), while ‘a reading of Pearse’s poetry clearly demonstrates how [his] view of boys and boys’ culture was filtered through the lens of homoerotic desire.’ (p.141.) She also discusses the affinity between the term macaomh and the Edwardian English word lad, with its homoerotic associations (p.145.) She also quotes “Little lad of the tricks”, the most ‘disturbingly pederastic’ of his poems [as infra].
Elaine Sisson (Pearse’s Patriots, 2004) - cont.: ‘There are some important differences between Pearse’s Boy Deeds [i.e., Boyhood Deeds] and versions in Irish manuscripts. Most obvious is the fact that Pearse’s version omits certain incidents which are unflattering to Cúchulainn. On his arrival at Eamham Macha Cúchulainn is said to have killed fifty members of the Boy Corps and to have murdered a servant who woke him up too early. [Philip] O’Leary notes that Pearse’s modifications of the Book of Leinster [version of the] Táin involve a rejection of “episodes which present Cúchulainn in a negative, especially an excessively violent light or which are marked by the crude exaggeration or an unnecessary venture into the supernatural”. For ease of performance and for stage management purposes many of the incidents central to the tale of Cúchulainn happen off-stage: for example, the fight with Culann’s hounds and the rite-of-passage fighting with the enemies of Ulster wherein Cúchulainn proves his manhood. O’Leary wryly notes that Cúchulainn was supposedly greeted by a troupe of naked women on his return to Eamhain Macha and that Pearse’s unwillingness to be true to the text was understandable in the presence of an excitable adolescent cast. However there are other changes in the pageant which are less obviously necessary. On Cúchulainn’s arrival at Eamhain Macha, Pearse has the boys invite him to join their hurling. In the Book of Leinster Táin Cúchulainn interferes without being asked and shows considerable arrogance to the boys. In the pageant Cúchulainn a’dentally overhears the druid Cathbadh’s prophecy, whereas in the original texts he obtains this information by lies and trickery.’ (p.95; with ref. to Philip O’Leary, ‘What Stalked Through the Post Office: Pearse’s Cuchulainn’, Pearse Museum Archive.)
Charles Townsend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion (Penguin Ireland 2006), Chap. 1: “Revolutionism”: ‘When Patrick Henry Pearse stepped out of his newly established headquarters in the Dublin General Post Office, shortly after noon on Easter Monday 1916, to read the proclamationi of the Irish Republic, he drew deeply on the history of Irish resistance to British rule - “the dead generations” from which Ireland received “her old tradition of nationhood”. To understand his famous words, we need to plunge back into that historical deep. How far? From Pearse’s own angle of vision, the apostolic succession stretched back to prehistory and legend. In his fierce, incantatory poem Mionn (“Oath”), he took it back to “the murder of Red Hugh” - the sixteenth century chieftain Hugh O’Donnell. In the proclamation of the republic he specified that “the Irish people” had asserted “in arms” their right to national freedom and sovereignty “six times in the past three hundreds years”. This was an impressive genealogy of revolt; but its apparent coherence disguised some significant variation among these outbursts of the national spirit. How connected, how coherent, in fact, were such struggles as those of the old Gaelic princes, Hugh O’Neill and Patrick Sarsfield, the United Irishmen, or the Fenian movement of the 1860s? In what sense were they conducted by the “Irish people”? / We may not need to follow Pearse all the way back to the sixteenth century - though Irish nationalists routinely went much further, and invoked “eight centuries” of resistance to English rule; but we do need to examine the system that had existedsince the Union of 1801.’ (Penguin Ireland website online [pdf]; accessed 28.10.2007.)
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