TO return to the forgotten figure of Emily Lawless, who is only ever remembered, if at all, for her fine poem, After Aughrim. Her work is infuriatingly hard to find, and is often infused with the national despair of the time.
With the Wild Geese is a collection which typifies this melancholy, for which there was good enough reason. Nationalist Ireland was still divided, confused and embittered by the "Parnellite split and by the failure to secure Home Rule. Emigration ravaged the land, as did a terrible sense of woe, of a fortune defiled and a future stolen.
Her anguish was Ireland's -
Never another land but has gathered some bountiful harvests,
Never another race but can boast of its moments of triumph
Never another shore but some good bark has attained it,
Laden with spices and ore, laden with silks and with jewels,
Argosies rich and rare, argosies worth the unfolding.
Only thou, only thou, has reaped no fortunate harvests,
Only thou, only thou has stood from the dawn to the gloaming,
Holding out empty hands pleading in vain to thy God...
Century following century, still at the heels of the nations,
Poor, divided, derided, a witmark and sport to the dull.
Poor, divided
And indeed, those words, "Poor, divided, derided; a witmark and sport to the dull," were to have a currency into quite recent times. She employed in this same poem a motif of a vapour veiled chapel from which the Angelus was ringing out, and for a while en visages a day when Ireland can rescue itself from its stupor - Rubbing astonished eyes, rid of the nightmare of ages./Brother no longer against brother, hurting the heart of their mother/Neighbour no longer against neighbour, rousing the scorn of the stranger/ Snatching precarious food from mouths already too empty . . ."
But then she sees the vapours rolling in gain, heavy, tenacious, unkind, "thicker and thicker still hiding the land in their clutches, Wrapping it carefully round, as a corpse is wrapped in its cere cloth . . ."
And here we perhaps see one reason why Emily Lawless did not find her way on to the syllabus of the New Ireland which was waiting round the corner to the vapours which she sees as engulfing and stifling the country are those of the Catholic Church which was soon about to come into its own, ruling lawmaker and teacher for half a century. That iron hand is now lifted; in its lifting, might we not see again the works of Emily Lawless republished?
Blighted tribe
The Lawlesses were an unlucky, blighted tribe. Her grandfather, Lord Cloncurry, who had opposed the Union, took a famous legal action against Sir John Piers, who had wagered that he could seduce the Lady Cloncurry and bring enormous unhappiness to the Cloncurry family. He won his bet. Her father, also Lord Cloncurry, committed suicide, and Emily Lawless was raised by the Kirwans of Castlehackett, Co Galway, where she learned to speak Irish.
Her life - and here I am plagiarising Women of Ireland: A Biographic Dictionary was isolated and tragic, and marred by the suicides of two sisters. She seems to have been haunted by the memory of her family's travails in, exile Lawlesses had fled with Sarsfield, and the ghosts, of the dead Lawlesses returning to Clare were the inspiration of the poem quoted the other day, which ends. "Men of Corca Bascinn, men of Clare's Brigade,/Harken, stony hills of Clare, hear the charge we made:/See us come together, singing from the fight,/Home, to Corca Bascinn, in the morning light."
Her passionate engagement in the desolations of Irish history were of course of her time, yet her threnody to the lost woodlands of Munster manages to encompass both contemporary and modern preoccupations. The great stands of tree are being felled, and this is their dirge - "The axe is sharpened to cut down my pride:/I pass, I die, and leave no natural heirs./Soon shall my sylvan coronals be cast;/My hidden sanctuaries, my secret ways,/Naked must stand to the rebellious blast;/No spring shall quicken what this autumn slays...
Preoccupied with death
It ends in her not unusual preoccupation with death. "On the grey wolf I lay my sovereign ban,/The great grey wolf with scraping claws, lest he lay bare my dead for gloating foes to see/ Lay bare my dead, who died, and died for me."
But amongst the many jewels which Emily Lawless left us unseen, untouched, is an anthem for Bord Failte:
Not hers your vast imperial mart, Where myriad hopes on fears are hurled, Where furious rivals meet and part, To woo a World.
Not hers your vast imperial town, Your mighty mammoth piles of gain, Your loaded vessels sweeping down, To glut the main.
Unseen, unused, her rivers flow, From mountain tarn to ocean tide, Wide vacant leagues the sunbeams show, The rainclouds hide.
Stud all your shores with prosperous towns! Blacken your hillsides, mile on mile! Redden with bricks your patient downs! And proudly smile!
A day will come before you guess. A day when men, with clearer light, Will rue that deed beyond redress, Will loathe that sight.
And, loathing, fly the hateful place, And shuddering, quit the hideous thing, For where unblackened rivers race, And skylarks sing.
I see her in those coming days, Still young, still gay, her unbound hair Crowned with a crown of starlike rays, Serenly fair.
I see an envied haunt of peace, Clam and untouched, remote, from roar, there wearied men may from their burdens cease. Or a still shore.
We still have a still shore and a land which Emily Lawless could only have dreamt of a century ago. Is there not a publisher who can rescue her from the oblivion which has engulfed her and her melancholy genius!