friend. His play Cathleen ní Houlihan (1902) cast the beautiful nationalist Maud Gonne in the part of a withered hag who would only walk again like a radiant young queen if young men were willing to kill and die for her. To the republican insurrectionistP. S. O'Hegarty, the drama became at once "a sort of sacrament", to the rebel Countess Markievicz "a kind of gospel". 16 The Rising, when it came, was therefore seen by many as a foredoomed classical tragedy, whose denouement was both inevitable and unpredictable, prophesied and yet surprising. Though it remained mysterious to many, the event was long in the gestation.
Year one of the revolutionists' calendar was 1893, because it marked
the foundation of the Gaelic League. Even more striking than this, however, was the aura of the 1890s which clung to the characters caught up in the crisis, for many had been impressionable adolescents in theaesthetic decade. The rebels, Wilde-like, opted to invest their genius in their life and only their talent in their work, for they offered their lives to the public as works of art. Seeing themselves as martyrs for beauty, they aestheticized their sacrifice. Most of all, they followed the gospel which asserted "the triumph of failure", the notion that whoever lost his life would save it. This idea underlies Thomas Mac-Donagh's play When the Dawn is Come and Pearse's The Singer, whose hero says:
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. 17
Equally, Joseph Plunkett's poem "The Little Black Rose Shall be Red at Last" reworks the bardic image of Ireland as róisín dubh (dark róisín) into a nineties-ish mode:
Because we share our sorrows and our joys
And all your dear and intimate thoughts are mine
We shall not fear the trumpets and the noise
Of battle, for we know our dreams divine,
And when my heart is pillowed on your heart
And ebb and flowing of their passionate flood
Shall beat in concord love through every part
Of brain and body – when at last the blood
O'er leaps the final barrier to find
Only one source whereon to spend its strength,
And we two lovers, long but one in mind
And soul, are made one flesh at length;
Praise God, if mis my blood fulfils the doom
When you, dark rose, shall redden into bloom. 18
Here the Gaelic conceit of a ruler married to the land, whose relation is mediated by the poet, is replaced by the image of a poet whose body bleeds into the earth. This sexual congress will restore new life even though he dies, like the victim of a fertility rite, in the act. In his devotion to the Romantic Image which at once discloses and withholds its meanings, Plunkett provided yet another example of the age's
penchant for the half-said thing, the symbol radiant with partially-articulated possibility.
The challenge of using the known to hint at the unknowable would eventually strike Yeats, the most articulate of all the poets of the nineties, as the artistic problem posed by revolution. It is the question broached in his play TheResurrection : "What if there is always something that lies outside knowledge, outside order? What if at the moment when knowledge and order seem complete that something appears?" 19 That question, or a version of it, is embedded in many of Yeats's most visionary poems and plays: he is at his bravest and most vulnerable whenever he seeks to welcome the "rough beast" of the unknowable future, without recourse to the props of the past for help or support.
The Easter rebels are sometimes depicted as martyrs to a text like Cathleen ní Houlihan, but rather than reduce the living to a dead textuality, Yeats at his most daring asserts the power of texts to come to life. As a poet, he invents an ideal Ireland in his imagination, falls deeply in love with its form and proceeds to breathe it, Pygmalion-like, into being. It is hard, even now, to do full
Year one of the revolutionists' calendar was 1893, because it marked
the foundation of the Gaelic League. Even more striking than this, however, was the aura of the 1890s which clung to the characters caught up in the crisis, for many had been impressionable adolescents in theaesthetic decade. The rebels, Wilde-like, opted to invest their genius in their life and only their talent in their work, for they offered their lives to the public as works of art. Seeing themselves as martyrs for beauty, they aestheticized their sacrifice. Most of all, they followed the gospel which asserted "the triumph of failure", the notion that whoever lost his life would save it. This idea underlies Thomas Mac-Donagh's play When the Dawn is Come and Pearse's The Singer, whose hero says:
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. 17
Equally, Joseph Plunkett's poem "The Little Black Rose Shall be Red at Last" reworks the bardic image of Ireland as róisín dubh (dark róisín) into a nineties-ish mode:
Because we share our sorrows and our joys
And all your dear and intimate thoughts are mine
We shall not fear the trumpets and the noise
Of battle, for we know our dreams divine,
And when my heart is pillowed on your heart
And ebb and flowing of their passionate flood
Shall beat in concord love through every part
Of brain and body – when at last the blood
O'er leaps the final barrier to find
Only one source whereon to spend its strength,
And we two lovers, long but one in mind
And soul, are made one flesh at length;
Praise God, if mis my blood fulfils the doom
When you, dark rose, shall redden into bloom. 18
Here the Gaelic conceit of a ruler married to the land, whose relation is mediated by the poet, is replaced by the image of a poet whose body bleeds into the earth. This sexual congress will restore new life even though he dies, like the victim of a fertility rite, in the act. In his devotion to the Romantic Image which at once discloses and withholds its meanings, Plunkett provided yet another example of the age's
penchant for the half-said thing, the symbol radiant with partially-articulated possibility.
The challenge of using the known to hint at the unknowable would eventually strike Yeats, the most articulate of all the poets of the nineties, as the artistic problem posed by revolution. It is the question broached in his play TheResurrection : "What if there is always something that lies outside knowledge, outside order? What if at the moment when knowledge and order seem complete that something appears?" 19 That question, or a version of it, is embedded in many of Yeats's most visionary poems and plays: he is at his bravest and most vulnerable whenever he seeks to welcome the "rough beast" of the unknowable future, without recourse to the props of the past for help or support.
The Easter rebels are sometimes depicted as martyrs to a text like Cathleen ní Houlihan, but rather than reduce the living to a dead textuality, Yeats at his most daring asserts the power of texts to come to life. As a poet, he invents an ideal Ireland in his imagination, falls deeply in love with its form and proceeds to breathe it, Pygmalion-like, into being. It is hard, even now, to do full
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