Joseph Mary Plunkett

Life
1887-1916; poet and revolutionary, son of Count George Noble Plunkett; ed. privately and at Stonyhurst; spent parts of childhood in Sicily and Malta for reasons of health [TB]; The Circle and the Sword (1911), poems, were published while he was in Algieria; met Thomas MacDonagh before leaving for Algiers and sought Irish lessons from him for matriculation at National University; settled in Donnybrook on returning to Ireland and shared a house there with his sister Geraldine; co-ed. with Padraic Colum and others, The Irish Review, suppressed on account of his own articles, Nov. 1914; associated with Edward Martyn and Thomas MacDonagh in founding Irish Theatre, Hardwicke St., 1914; joined IRB and became Director of Operations;

became a mbr. of the IRB Supreme Council and Military Council, 1915; accompanied Casement, a close friend, to Germany in search of guns and left German High Command unimpressed; co-ed. with Sean Mac Diarmada the ‘Castle Document’; underwent throat surgery shortly prior to Rising, and left convalescent home to participate at the GPO, as aide-de-camp to Michael Collins, 1916; mbr. Provisional Govt.; tried at Richmond Barracks; sentence to death by Col. Colonel E.W.S.K. Maconchy; returned to Mountjoy cell; m. Grace Gifford in Kilmainham chapel on the eve of his execution, the ceremony being conducted by Fr. McCarthy; Grace was subsequently arrested and held in North Union Workhouse; released under General Amnesty, 1917 (d. 13 Dec. 1955); his sister Geraldine Plunkett ed. collected poems as Poems of Joseph Mary Plunkett (1916). DIB DIW DIH DIL ODQ KUN [FDA] OCIL

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Works
The Poems of Joseph Mary Plunkett [Educational Company of Ireland] (Dublin: Talbot Press; NY: Frederick A. Stokes Co. 1916), xvipp. [preface by Geraldine Plunkett], 2 l., 95pp. Incls. poems from Occulta; Earlier and Later Poems.

The poems of Joseph Mary Plunkett.
by Joseph Mary Plunkett
Published: 1916, Frederick A. Stokes company (New York)
Contributions: Geraldine Plunkett.
Pagination: xvi p., 2 l., 95pp.

Available at Internet Archive

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Criticism
P. S. O’Hegarty ‘Bibliography of Joseph Mary Plunkett’, in Dublin Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1931); Geraldine Plunkett Dillon, All in the Blood (Dublin: A. & A. Farmar 2006), 350pp. [by the sister of J. M. Plunkett who married Thomas Dillon, Prof. of Chem., NUI Galway].

The Poems of Joseph Mary Plunkett[Educational Company of Ireland] (Dublin: Talbot Press 1916)
FOREWORD [by Geraldine Plunkett]

Joseph Plunkett was the son of Count and Countess Plunkett, and was born in Dublin in November, 1887. He attended the CathoUc University School and Belvedere College, but his wide reading did more to educate him than any schools.

He followed the two years Philosophy course at Stonyhurst College when he was eighteen. This made a strong impression on him. He kept up the study of Scholastic Philosophy and was very much influenced by mystical contemplation “or loving inclination towards God.” The books that were his most constant companions were St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, St. Francis, and John Tauler. Their mark on his poetry is very plain, though, as his short article on Obscurity and Poetry will show, he would apply the term “mystic “ to but a very small part of his own verse. He showed me two or three poems that he called mystic, but I cannot find these now and must presume them destroyed. Of course he employed the symbolism of the mystics broadcast.

He was obliged by ill-health to spend a great deal of his short life in inactivity and to winter abroad. He and his mother spent a winter [viii] travelling in Itaty, Sicily and Malta, where he had a good friend, and another winter was spent in Algiers with a sister, where he studied the Arabic Hterature and language, enlarging his range of images by what he found there, though it is curious that the only poem which is purely Arabic in imagery is the short poem, “It is her voice that dwells within the emerald walls and sapphire house of flame,” which he wrote before he went to Algiers. I also think it possible that the queer, flamboyant and melodramatic happenings which there came his way may have coloured that part of his verse which is more unrestrained and violent than the rest, for instance some of the sonnets in “ Occulta.”

Before he went to Algiers he had met Thomas MacDonagh — who was teaching at St. Enda’s School, Rathfarnham, which he had helped P. H. Pearse to start. My brother wanted someone to teach him Irish for the matriculation of the National University and Thomas MacDonagh taught him for some time, and when he discovered my brother was a poet I think there was more poetry than pedagogy in their relationsliip. “The Circle and the Sword” was published in 1911, the year my brother was in Algiers. Thomas MacDonagh made the selection himself from my brother’s poems, and saw the book through the press

[Ftn. *The title from “ The Mistress of Vision,” by Francis Thompson.]

[ix] Although there are a good many immature and defective poems in it it is rather remarkable for a first book. The lyric, “White Dove of the Wild Dark Eyes” would be difficult to surpass on its own ground; the sonnet “I saw the sun at midnight, rising red,” the poems “1867,” “I see his blood upon the rose,” “My soul is sick with longing,” and “The stars sang in God’s garden” are all above the level of first books. I have included these and a few others which I thought worthy in this book, as I know he wished only these few to be considered as part of his mature work.

When he returned from Algiers he had a house of his own in Donnybrook, where we kept house together for two and a half years. With the exception of P. H. Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh he had few other literary friends in Dublin up to the time he became interested in the Irish Review. This was started by Professor Houston in 1911, in association with James Stephens, Thomas MacDonagh and Padraic Colum. Mr. Houston edited it himself for some time and Padraic Colum was editor in 1912-13. Two poems of my brother’s were printed in it; he got to know the people who were associated with it very well, and in June, 1913, he became editor himself.

Any cause he was interested in was discussed in the Review; for instance, the men’s case in the strike of summer, 1913, and the Volunteer movement [x] from November of the same year to the date of the seizure of a large number of copies of the Review by the pohce in London in November, 1914. Joseph Campbell, Conal O’Riordan, James Cousins, Lord Dunsany, Darrell Figgis, Arthur Griffith, Mary Hayden, W. M. Letts, Susan Mitchell, Seumas O’Sullivan, M. A. Rathkyle, Frederick Ryan, Sheehy Skeffington, Jack Morrow, John Mac Neill, Peter Mac Brien — these, with Thomas Mac Donagh, James Stephens, Padraic Colum, P. H. Pearse, Edward Martyn, and David Houston are the names of the goodly company who were constant contributors to the Review.

Sir Roger Casement, who was my brother’s intimate friend, had written articles for the Review when Padraic Colum was editor, and continued to write in prose and verse for my brother. The Review was not in good financial condition when it came into his hands, and as he had not sufiicient capital to put it properly on its feet, he just kept it going in the same way as he found it until the police seizure in London, which I have mentioned, made the loss too great for it to be carried on any longer.

From the time we were in Donnybrook, Thomas MacDonagh and my brother lived and worked in close relationship. Apart from the Review they criticised everything each of them wrote in the most vigorous way, and to them criticism was an exact science. My brother published Thomas [xi] MacDonagh’s “Lyrical Poems,” and they were both keenly interested in the printing and form of the book. He also published P. H. Pearse’s “Suantraidhe agus Goltraidhe.”

The Irish Theatre was started in 1914 by a partnership consisting of Edward Martyn, Thomas MacDonagh and my brother. Its purpose, as opposed to the purpose of the Abbey Theatre, was to produce Irish plays other than peasant plays, plays in Irish, and foreign masterpieces. They played periodically in Hardwicke Street, and produced plays by Edward Martyn, Eimar O’Duffy, John MacDonagh, Tchekoff, etc., and have been on the whole very successful in carrying out their objects. Towards the last six months my brother disagreed with the other directors for not abiding by the spirit of the agreement and definitely dissociated himself from the Theatre on the production of Strindberg’s “Easter.” The Irish Theatre is still in existence and is being carried on by Mr. Martyn and Mr. John MacDonagh.

The first section of this volume — “Occulta “ — was to have been my brother’s next book. He arranged it himself in the order in which it now stands, wherein the sequence of thought is unbroken. I have gathered together in the second part his later verse and those earlier poems which he would have considered worthy of republication, including those from the “Circle and the Sword.” Many of his poems have been [xii] destroyed, or at any rate are irrecoverable, and these poems of the second section are fragmentary and disconnected — but I have not included in this book anything I think he thought second rate, and have omitted a fairly long poem that I am sure he intended to be left out.

He had outgrown all tours de force, all false standards, and gone to the desperate simplicity which is so hard to reach.

He wrote verse with difficulty, but, once written, rarely made any alteration. In this he differed in an extraordinary degree from Thomas MacDonagh, who suffered in equal measure from a too great facility in verse writing, and would alter a completed poem repeatedly till he was satisfied that it approximated to the poem of his imagination. The poems in this book have an appearance of ease, but they were written after the author had mastered his medium and the very labour that went to their making has but made them flow more evenly and contributed to the effect. He did not consider the versifying, but the thought expressed, to be of importance, and did not put much value on his best lyrics, as e.g., the poem called “ O Lovely Heart !”

Though my brother and Thomas MacDonagh differed widely in their methods of writing, their critical standards and judgments were alike. In the article “ Obscurity and Poetry, “ reprinted here, there is a great likeness to the character of [xiii] Thomas MacDonagh’s last book, both in the matter, that is in the aspects of the subject discussed, and the curiously painstaking method of discussion, due, I believe, to the fact that they were dealing with what was to them an exact science for which they had no exact terms.

Their spoken criticism also had the same characteristics— both of them as quick, to construct as to destroy, to praise as to blame, not sparing in either, though Thomas MacDonagh was the more severe of the two.

There are a few verses which, while out of place in the text, I do not care to omit, and there is one ballad, better than either of these which follow, that it is perhaps too soon to publish. The ballad of the “ Foot and Mouth” is an extremely good imitation of the old topical ballad, with all its beautiful badnesses. It is sung to “ The Groves of Blarney.”

As I walked over to Magheraroarty
On a summer’s evening not long ago,
I met a maiden most sadly weeping,
Her cheeks down streaming with the signs of woe.
I asked what ailed her, as sure became me
In manner decent with never a smile
She said I'll tell thee, O youthful stranger.
What is my danger at the present time.

[xvi] One last fragment, written for his sister Moya, in Algiers, in 1911, where sounds like this occurred so often that they were part of the place :

MURDER

The clatter of blades and the clear
Cold shiver of steel in the night —
Blood spurts in the strange moonlight —
The pattering footsteps of fear, A little thud and a sigh —
The babbling whispers are still.
Clouds come over the hill
Silence comes over the sky.

Geraldine Plunkett.
30th June, 1916.

[pag. at top of each excepting vii; available at Internet Archive - online.

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Commentary
Dublin Magazine (Spring 1966), Geraldine Plunkett [his sister], ‘Joseph Plunkett’, in Dublin Magazine (Spring 1966), pp.63-65, first poems were nonsense poems; started writing patriotic verse at fifteen; effected throughout childhood by ill-health; The Circle and the Sword issued by Maunsel in 1911, and organised by MacDonagh, while he was in Algiers; George Roberts demanded a certain bulk, and a sum towards cost of printing; called Joe; widely read in English poetry, influenced by Donne and Crashaw; often composed a complete poem mentally before he wrote it down and was then unable to alter it; no encouragement as poet until he met MacDonagh in 1911; nearly inseparable; started Theatre of Ireland with Edward Martyn, who paid the producer John MacDonagh; Joe gave the Hardwicke Hall, which belonged to his mother, and Thomas directed; plays ‘other than peasant plays’; theatre ended in 1916, when Martyn tried to carry it on alone; MacDonagh and Prof. Davy Houston asked Joe to take over the Irish Review, then struggling, in spring 1913; he raised money to pay its debts, and produced ten more issues; they also published MacDonagh’s Lyrical Poems and Pearse’s Suantraighe agus Goltraighe. Review ended Nov. 1914, not suppressed under Defence of the Realm Act but ruined by seizure of issue containing ‘Twenty Plain Facts for Irishmen’. Tom Kettle started Peace Committee to resolve 1913 Lockout, co-sec. Joseph Plunkett with Tom Dillon. Present at Rotunda Rink meeting of 1913 which founded Irish Volunteers, a member of Provisional Committee. ‘and from that time he put his mind to doing what he knew he had to do, but he continued to write poetry.’ The book printed after his death was ready for printing before Easter 1916. A big red folder of poems must have been burnt in the GPO.

Brendan Kennelly, ‘The Poetry of Joseph Plunkett’, in Dublin Magazine (Spring 1966), pp.56-65. ... we should remember he had a unique visionary intensity; that some of his best poetry is born out of deep inner conflict; that he was concerned with the problems of good and evil in a way that Pearse and MacDonagh were not; and that occasionally, despite all his uncertainties, he speaks with a mystic’s certainty, insight and authority. (p.56) ... tension between the sense of his own greatest and the sense of his own littleness runs through ‘Occulta’, the first section of his Collected Poems. ... frequently confused and obscure, but one feels that this is so because his mystical experiences overwhelm his power of articulation ... occasionally ... takes what is essentially a meagre idea and inflates it to fill the sonnet form ... (p.57); His own dream-battle which was to become a grim reality, is symbolic of the struggle between good and evil in the heart of man. Viz., ‘Heaven and Hell’ (I alone of the souls I know/In Hell and Heaven am high and low ... My song gains power and grows more grim’) (p.58), ‘The Dark Way’ (‘Rougher than Death the road I choose/Yet shall my feet not walk astray/Though dark, my way I shall not loose/For this way is the darkest way ..’) and ‘Spark’ (Because I know the spark/Of God has no eclipse/Now Death and I embark/And sail into the dark/With laughter on our lips.’) (p.59); Probably the deepest single influence on Plunkett is Blake.. [whose] dictum ‘Without contraries there is no progression’ is at the very core of Plunkett’s thought [and] sustains one of his longest poems, ‘Heaven is Hell’ ... ‘I See His Blood Upon the Rose’, a poem which has survived the brutalising familiarity of many anthologies ... (p.60) love poems to Grace Gifford ... though passionate, are characteristically quiet; No doubt about his powers, ‘My songs shall see the ruin of the hills,/My songs shall sing the dirges of the stars.’ Tuberculosis and his own political convictions were against his development ... ‘There is no deed I would not dare ... the birth of the martyr meant the death of the poet ... (p.62 END).

Patricia Boylan, All Cultivated People (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1988), p.91: ‘Plunkett’s letter of resignation from the [United Arts] club [opposing the club’s unwillingness to support the anti-enlistment campaign of Constance Markievicz] was read ... It would have been received with joy and relief had they known what he was up to - apart from his literary activities. He had edited The Irish Review for a year, but it had expired for want of support. He was now busy with the Irish Theatre, started by Edward Martyn with Thomas MacDonagh and himself ... The Theatre lasted only a year but it provided Plunkett with the perfect excuse for experimenting with disguises for his cloak-and-dagger activities as Director of Military Operations in the most secret Irish Republican Brotherhood ... theatrical manner of dress ... and delicate features hid an extremely efficient organiser [a]lready planning the deposition of forces ... [90]

David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland (Manchester UP 1986): Plunkett pithily expressed his view of Anglo-Irish mysticism in the title of an essay ‘Obscurity and Poetry’, and MacDonagh’s play Metempsychosis ... &c. [105]

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References
Oxford Dictionary of Quots., ‘I see his blood upon the rose/And in the stars the glory of his eyes’, from Poems (1916). FDA2 [286, 781, 782]. SEE also Irish Book Lover 4, 6, 13, 16. BELF holds Poems (1916).

Stephen Brown, The Press in Ireland (1937), Historical Sketch: III - The Modern Literary Revival’, pp.86-87 - quotes first editorial: ‘The Irish Review has been founded to give expression to the intellectual movement in Ireland. By the intellectual movement we do not understand an activity purely literary; we think of it as the applcation of Irish intelligence to the reconstruction of Irish life.’ Further, makes reference to the issue for May 1912 which contained an article by Arthur Griffith on ‘Home Rule and the Unionists’; the last number contained an article by MacDonagh on ‘the Best Living Irish Poet’ - viz, Alice Milligan; a story by Lord Dunsany; and the manifesto of the Irish Volunteers repudiating the leadership of John Redmond. Also twenty ‘Plain Facts for Irishmen’ in a thorough-going national spirit (acc. to Fr. Brown). Brown also refers to a review of the same name [Irish Review] but entirely different in character started in 1922, with contribs. from P. S. O’Hegarty, Lionel Smith-[Gornd], Eimar O’Duffy, and Padraic O’Conaire [sic].

Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (1979): b. Nov. 1887; IRB, missions to Germany and USA, director of military operations; fnd with others The Irish Review; The Circle and the Sword (1911); post, Poems (Dublin: Talbot 1916). COMM, William Irwin, The Imagination of an Insurrection, Dublin Easter 1916 (OUP 1961), pp.131-139 [‘The poems show talent, but it is anybody’s guess if their baroque and chryselephantine lusciousness could every be brought under control, and once under control, directed toward greatness’; quoted in DIL]

 

Quotations
I see his blood upon the rose,/A pathways by his feet are worn/His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea,/His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn,/His cross is every tree.’ (Poems, 1916, p.50; cited in Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal: The Irish Revolution in Literature from Parnell to the Death of W. B. Yeats, 1891-1939, Gill & Macmillan 1977, p.82.)

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