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EASTERRISING

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A HOLE IN HISTORY
How do you imagine a rebellion? Is it as we read in books, such as Katniss overtake of a totalitarian power in The Hunger Games? Maybe the American Revolution offers a more grounded depiction of rebellion. Is there such an image as the ideal rebellion? If so, it does not line up to the events of Irelands 1916 Easter Rising. On Easter Monday I got up and went to the races at Fairyhouse, said James OConner, witness to the Rising. While at the Races I heard that the Rising had started in Dublin. It was the general talk at the Races that evening. I came home on Tuesday, bringing my shotgun and cartridges, I joined the Battn (Luddy 10). It was a Monday like any other, until grenades and mortar broke the morning silence. Central Dublin was shook to its knees, the General Post Office bombarded by British shells, Irish volunteers shoddily armed inside, firing at the massive, encroaching gigas called the British Army. Of the 20,000, its estimated 106 British troops fell compared to only 62 defending rebels. Through violence, the Irish sought to oppose Home Rule and their perceived historical oppressors, and through violence the British responded. Sixteen leaders of the Rising were swiftly executed. Mothers and wives, distraught by the rubble and blood flowing at their feet, shouted to Bayonet them! as the Risings leaders were first hauled off. Now the same people were in shock of swift British justice. This ambivalence has defined Easter Risings legacy throughout the decades. On the whole, many Irish do not openly celebrate Easter Rising on its anniversary. In private, they tell the media it was a precursor to Irish liberation and a source of national pride. If the Germans had successfully armed the Irish volunteers, would the Rising have succeeded? If the British had imprisoned instead of martyred James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, would Britain have proven itself too benevolent for the title of imperial oppressor? Why did Ireland not rise as a nation during the rebellion, isolating the conflict to Dublin? The ifs are just as important as the facts in determing just went went wrong with Easter Rising. The roots of the Rising hint at an organization and purpose. In the midst of the first World War, Ireland was still seeking its independance. Quasi-freedom was being pushed through legal channels in the form of Home Rule. If Home Rule passed, it meant the submission of Northern Ireland to complete anglicization, as Irish Republicans feared. Even if the British were not oppressive under these terms, many Irish felt that full autonomy was the only reasonable solution to centuries of British subjugation. The British were deaf to these sentiments. To them, the rebels voice was out of touch and void of influence. They never anticipated the Rising. They were half right. Without influence, the rebels felt their only option was physical force. Poets such as W.B. Yeats were critical of Irish apathy and indifference toward cultural development. Prior to the rising, in his poem September 1913, he wrote in pained language: They were of a different kind, The names that stilled your childish play, They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For who the hangmans rope was spun, And what, God help us, could they save? Romantic Irelands dead and gone, Its with OLeary in the grave. A call for change was evident among the Irish educated. The question is, how justified was change through violence? And how did it portray Irish ambitions to the rest of the world? In dealing with the aftermath of Easter Rising, British authorities struggled to identify with the Irish need for an uprising. Brig Maconchy, a British officer: me that I asked him if he would mind telling me quite apart from his trial what he was fighting for. He drew himself up and said: I was fighting to defend the rights of the people of Ireland. I then asked him if anyone was attacking these rights and he said: No, but they might have been (Maconchy 456). The inconclusive reality of Easter Rising is a story of cultures and ideas overlapping endlessly, hundreds of years deep. It challenges the ideal of a universal truth, one that can be put into textbooks and taught to British and Irish children identical. It exists in the fold of two ages, in wrinkled and waterstained ink. The ink drips. It smears and slouches and holds no order.

Works Cited: Luddy, Maria. Ireland Rising. History Today1 Sept. 2012: 10-11. Print. Maconchy, Brig. Unpublished Memoirs of Brig E.W.S.K. Maconchy. London: British Army Museum, 1920. Print. Tuma, Keith. William Butler Yeats. Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 34. Print.

When called on for their defence they [the rebels] generally only convicted themselves out of their own mouths, and in many cases I refused to put down what they said as it only made their case worse. During the trial of one of the ringleaders, his whole attitude seemed so strange to

3 4 5 7

THE IRISH OPPOSERS

IN A LAND CALLED ULSTER

AND WHAT ROUGH BEAST . . . SLOUCHES ART OF THE MYTH

A MAGAZINE BY ZACH LONG

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THE IRISH OPPOSERS

SEVEN. Seven signatures greeted Dubliners on Easter Monday, declaring Ireland a free state under the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. 150 men assembled outside Liberty Hall. At 11:58 AM, Patrick Pearse, James Connelly, and Joseph Plunkett led the defenders of a new Irish state across Abbey Street. They claimed the General Post Office as a military hub, in anticipation of British retaliation (1916 Easter Uprising: The True Story). In many ways it was the moment Thomas Clarke had envisioned for decades, who had served 15 years for London bombings carried out in his youth. He was the first signatory, the most senior member, and a relic of Irish opposition to British rule. His rationale for independence through violence had not wavered. To him and other members, there was no justifying a British presence in Ireland (The Executed Leaders of the 1916 Rising). The British were taken by surprise at first but quickly recovered. It was immediately apparent that the rest of Ireland would not join the rebel cause. The volunteers were not deterred, but their first major blow was the injury and quarantine of James Connelly, a key military strategist. Another surprise, the British began firing artillery shells and tossing grenades indiscriminately, tearing away Central Dublin from the top down. On Saturday, the leaders evacuated the GPO and agreed to surrender, save for Thomas Clarke. His dissent was overruled, and finally the former prisoner and Irish devout had his legacy put to an end - until he and his revolutionary friends were executed. Patrick Pearse (middle) was in many ways the charisma and spirit behind the Easter Rising operation. His father was a self-educated sculptor. Pearse, appearing unhinged in his early years, could be seen as an extension of his fathers selfdetermination. On his day of execution, he wrote to his mother This is the death I should have asked for if God had given me the choice of all deaths (Patrick Pearse 1879-1916). Pearse tried and failed toward many endeavors throughout his lifetime, insisting his efforts would pay off in the end. Biographers such as Ruth Edwards looked on from the outside at this ambitious, troubled figure, noting an inability to combine pragmatism with idealism, all in the name of securing and cultivating an identity as an Irishman (Murphy 2103). His reading of the Easter Day Proclamation was one of the only public acts with which he could claim a higher purpose was realized, manifest to reality on the world stage.
Works Cited: Murphy, Cullen. Patrick Pearse (Book Review). Library Journal 103.18 (1978): 2103. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Nov. 2013. Patrick Pearse 1879-1916. BBC News. BBC, n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2013. The Executed Leaders of the 1916 Rising. Roinn an Taoisigh. Department of Taoiseach, 2013. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.

Joseph Plunkett (right) lived out life through his writing and games of the mind. He found relief in education between lifelong treatments for tuberculosis, which often left him bedridden. Plunkett aided in setting up an Irish National theater, a forerunner of the Irish Literary Revival, and he attempted to bring teeth the Rising in the form of German arms (Joseph Mary Plunkett 1887-1916). He carried out many operations in the background, until Easter when he fought in the Rising itself, though his participation was limited because of his deteriorating health. While awaiting execution, the British officer Lenin running the prison allowed Plunkett to be married to Grace Gifford, his longtime fiance. Lenin may have been sympathetic to Plunketts circumstance, or he may have allowed the marriage to spare Gifford from religious-based illegitimacy laws, if Gifford was indeed pregnant (1916 Easter Uprising: The True Story).
Works Cited: 1916 Easter Uprising: The True Story. 1916 Easter Uprising: The True Story. TG4. Ireland, n.d. Television. Easter 1916 | Joseph Mary Plunkett. Easter 1916. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.

James Connolly (left) was born in Edinburgh, to poverty, rough labor, and the hardships of colonialism in the industrial age. He opposed the forces of poverty fate had dealt him, committing his life to change, seeing that change possible only through reorganized social structure (James Connolly 1868-1916). He associated himself strongly with labor unionists such as James Larkin. Decolonization defined Connolly. For every beneficiary of Irish anglicization, Connolly had words and examples illustrating the dire state of human dignity under deference to British policy. Autonomy of spirit was the simple-on-paper and compicated-to-achieve goal of the Irish impoverished. Connollys choice of freedom through force seems to run against the even-minded, action-oriented man, who had a talent for strategy. His execution was the only carried out tied to a chair, due to an injury suffered at the Rising.
Works Cited: James Connolly 1868-1916. BBC News. BBC, n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.

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IN A LAND CALLED ULSTER

Ulster constitutes the northernmost region of Ireland, where Christianity first entered and tranformed much of the people. Churches and shrines across the land were morphed and adapted from pagan to Christian places of worship. Churches nearly always recycled old, preChristian ideas to serve their new faith (Markus 19). Much of the Irish revivals roots stemmed from a renewed interest in Irish history and mythology. Why? Populations often look to the past for answers in times of moral and economic uncertainty. The interest in Irish past suggested an incipient rejection of the modern world, or of capitalism or of some other perceived conventionalism, and it indicates a desire to find a more agreeable way of life (Sayers 273).
Works Cited: Markus, Gilbert. Rooted In The Tradition. Christian History 17.4 (1998): 19. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Nov. 2013. Sayers, Stephen. Irish Myth And Irish National Consciousness. Irish Studies Review 12.3 (2004): 271281. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.

THE FRENZY OF SWEENEY

Also known as The Madness of Suibhne, this Irish folktale follows the mad King Sweeney across Ireland, a king suffering from a terrible curse. Sweeneys kingdom is nestled between the border of what is now counties Down and Antrim. The action begins during the historical Battle of Moira in 637 AD. St Rnan is a major Christian influence in Ireland and Sweeney, a king of pagan faith, is sentenced to live life as a half-man, half-bird after angering Rnan on the battlefield. In his lost journies, Sweeney shifts between praising the beauty of nature around him and agonizing over his loneliness. His best friend cannot approach him in his maddened state. Pursuing Sweeney across Ireland throughout the story, he wishes to cure his friends curse (The Book of Irish Writers).
You are not cruel, O alder. Cold wind, icy wind, Delightfully you gleam, Faint shadow of a feeble sun... Blackthorn, little thorny one, Enduring the rain-storm, Dark provider of sloes. Stepping along deer-paths, Watercress, little green-topped one, Slouching through greensward From the stream where blackbirds drink. On a day of grey frost.
Works Cited: The Book of Irish Writers: Chapter 5: Sweeneys Frenzy. BBC News. BBC, n.d. Web. 28 Nov. 2013.

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AND WHAT ROUGH BEAST. . . SLOUCHES

TURNING AND TURNING IN THE WIDENING GYRE THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER; THINGS FALL APART; THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD
THE SECOND COMING - 1919

W.B. YEATS
IRISH POET

What does it mean to be Irish and educated? W.B. Yeats portrays Irish disappointment from the view of a wandering falcon, embodying another piece of the Irish which cannot manage to form a whole. North and South Ireland cannot form a whole. Irish Catholics and Protestants cannot form a whole. The British and Irish certainly cannot form a whole. Not even literary circles seem to converge, Yeats being left out entirely from participation in the Rising. Yeats spent a lifetime writing about the missing piece in an Irish national identity. Like many Irish authors, he was not sure how to inspire his people to action. It could only translate into poetic frustration, betrayed by his own expectations and born from a love of the distant past. Yeats contemplated the Rising at length. He did not jump straight to the support of nationalist sentiment, as a famined artist might be expected to do. Instead his words echoed wasteful sacrifice that was tragic, potentially foolish, but perhaps necessary (Riede 403). He compares Irish revival to a rose tree, planted directly in front of its people: O Words are lightly spoken, Said Pearse to Connolly, Maybe a breath of politic words Has withered our Rose Tree; Or maybe but a wind that blows Across the bitter sea. It needs to be but watered, James Connolly replied, To make the green come out again And spread on every side, And shake the blossom from the bud To be the gardens pride.

But where can we draw water, Said Pearse to Connolly, When all the wells are parched away? O plain as plain can be Theres nothing but our own red blood Can make a right rose tree. The Rose Tree - 1921 An ideal past, the rose tree, is withered. No wells hold water to bring it back, perhaps no middle class or independent structure in Irish society. The only thing left to make the roses red is the blood of Pearse and Connolly, and the rest of the Risings dead. It could have easily turned into an empty sacrifice, if the leaders had perhaps been drafted into the World War I effort. The British had options before them and chose to shed blood for blood. It is certainly not surpising, even logical in some lights, that loyalist blood was exchanged for the dozens of British slain during the Rising. Yeats never worked through the ifs, instead he offered limited honor and another sigh in the silence following the firing squads cough.

Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stones in the midst of all. Easter, 1916 - 1916

Ireland - a stone in a world flowing as a river. It stays an accessory to industry. Writers around the world characterized industrial violence as a parallel to Irelands chaos and lack of identity. Hemingway and Wilfred Owen were hard at work dissassembling the rough beast of globalized war. Yeats believed World War I was a sign of the Second Birth, the beginning a violent, bestial anti-civilization (Unterecker 165). He turned to A terrible beauty is born. mysticism in his old age, dying in a time unfamil To sum up his feelings in the concise iar with his origin and purpose. manner of a poet, Yeats wrote these words to finalize the 20th century Irish legacy. The result, A few thousand will think of this day a tragic and thrashing narrative of cultural frus- As one thinks of a day when one did something tration, punctuated by momentous pitfalls: the slightly unusual. Dublin Lockout, the Rising, a culture of confusion. In the twilight of steel and smoke, and in In Memory of W.B. Yeats W.H. Auden, 1939 the shadow of red Britain, Yeats characterizes the Works Cited: Riede, Austin. W.B. Yeatss Economies Of Sacrifice: War, Irish reality: Rebellion, And Wasteful Virtue. Irish Studies Review 19.4 (2011): 401 Hearts with one purpose alone
411. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Nov. 2013 Unterecker, John. A Readers Guide to William Butler Yeats. London, Thames, 1959.

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OISN KELLY 1971

The Garden of Remembrance is a memorial garden in Dublin. It honors Irish men and women who gave their lives for universal freedom. This statue depicts the Irish folktale, Children of Lir.

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art

of the

myth
chiseled into Saintly facades. Swans are a uniquely British-Irish fascination. Protected under law for ages, no one may hunt or harm the creatures. They are considered the Queens property in England (We Eat Chickens, Ducks and Geese, but How Come Swans Evade Our Dinner Plates?). The Children of Lir are eventually released of their curse, but not before returning to a hopeless and ugly Ireland. Their exile was over, but they were greeted to nothing. There was no hope for them, not this time.
(continued on back)

O swans, my brothers, I am thinking of May good fortune be on the threshold of beauty, and we are flying away from it for your door from this time and for ever, but ever. we cannot cross it, for we have the hearts of wild swans and we must fly in the dusk The Children of Lir are children turned and feel the water moving under our bodswans, cursed to float atop the Western Sea ies; we must hear the lonesome cries of for 300 years by their vengeful stepmother. the night. We have the voices only of the children you knew; we have the songs you The carefree rhythm and language of the taught us--that is all. tale hints at an Ireland pre-occupied with Romanticism and natural beauty. Myths and folktales such as these gave substance to the Irish literary revival, though They say to their distraught father, learning they were possibly altered through out of his childrens curse and exile: time, adjusted to suit Irelands conversion to Christianity, just like their pagan statues

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The swans looked at the hills they had known, and every hill and mountain they could see was dark and sorrowful: not one had a star-heart of light, not one had a flame-crown, not one had music pulsing through it like a great breath. What had happened to Ireland in those 300 years? Christianity. Industry. The turbulence of rapid change. Yeats looked to swans as living symbols of an eternal Irish spirit: Their hearts have not grown old; Passion or conquest, wander where they will, Attend upon them still. The Wild Swans at Coole - 1916 His use of the present tense insists the past is still in Ireland, just not in human form. Both Easter 1916 and The Wild Swans at Coole reference intervals of time, by season. This echo is clearest in the concluding lines of the first stanza, All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born (Fox 57). Whatever legitimacy people may or may not find in Irelands national identity, and whatever extent British influence contributed, Easter 1916 is a portrait of discontent nearly too bleak. The Irish had access to schooling, protection from enemies, and economic benefits from England. They may have had everything short of absolute self-governance. A common Irish sentiment: The British answer to no one, so why should we answer to the British? The question is hard to dismiss.
Works Cited: Fox, Linda L. Nine-And-Fifty As Symbol In Yeatss The Wild Swans At Coole. English La guage Notes 26.1 (1988): 54. Academic Search Complete. Web. 29 Nov. 2013 Tuma, Keith. William Butler Yeats. Anthology of Twentieth-Century British & Irish Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 34. Print. We Eat Chickens, Ducks and Geese, but How Come Swans Evade Our Dinner Plates? | Notes and Queries | Guardian.co.uk. Guardian.co.uk. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2013.