Peter CostelloA Terrible Beauty: Poetry of 1916
selected by Mairéad Ashe Fitzgerald
(O’Brien Press, €14.99)
Almost immediately after the Rising was put down in 1916 there was published by the Talbot Press an anthology of the poetry of those among the executed leaders who were poets. Many of the poems, those by Pearse and MacDiarmid, were among the most moving of the time. Yet of course, they told only one part of the story.
This anthology takes a wider view and includes not only many long familiar poems, which readers will be glad to have in one volume, but many others which express what might be called a counter view.
The best of these is undoubtedly George Russell’s On Behalf of Some Irishmen Not followers of Tradition. By this, AE did not mean the leaders who had been executed or their followers.
He meant those with a different vision such as himself and Horace Plunkett and others, seen as outsiders as he admits.
Inclusive
Ireland still struggles with this problem despite a century having passed. The Government has decided on a decade of commemoration and is making every effort to be as inclusive as it can be.
But we should be aware, as the French became aware in celebrating the bicentennial of the French Revolution, that they were also marking the anniversary of the Terror and the expirations in the name of the revolution of the Royalists Catholics of the Vendee. We too have to be aware to the great crimes that lie hidden behind what we celebrate as patriotic acts.
Not all those who died were patriots. Those others, the victims of all sides, who were found down back alleys or on bare mountain sides have to be thought of too.
Behind the terrible beauty that Yeats spoke of there was something else, as he wrote in another poem (not included here), on the eventual outcome of what began in Easter Week: “We had fed the heart on fantasies,/the heart’s grown brutal from the fare,/More substance in our enmities/Than in our love.”
In this anthology, for the perceptive reader, reading carefully, there are many nuances of thought and feeling. All of them are worth pondering on.