Easter Rising Triptych: Sentence*
The Easter Rising of 1916 and the citizens behind the rebels.
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I'll be doing a series of separate Easter Rising-themed poems (three in total) over the coming days.
This is the first.
The Easter Rising of 1916, a doomed and heroic insurrection that briefly seized the heart of Dublin before being crushed beneath British artillery, was an event of such moral clarity that even its failure does not diminish its grandeur.
The men and women who took up arms—or, in the case of Constance Markievicz, a pistol and a bottle of brandy—were not mere rebels, but visionaries of a nation yet unborn. Their goal, so simple in its conception yet so profound in its implications, was nothing less than the resurrection of Irish sovereignty from the grave in which it had lain since the Act of Union.
What’s remarkable—indeed, what lends the Rising its peculiar nobility—was the sheer diversity of those who rallied to the cause. Here were poets and schoolteachers, trade unionists and aristocrats, socialists and devout Catholics, all united in their contempt for the imperial yoke.
Behind every rebel, every martyr, and the sheen of their cause, is a citizen first.
Padraig Pearse, the schoolmaster with a martyr’s temperament, stood shoulder to shoulder on the GPO’s steps with James Connolly, a hardened Marxist and trade unionist who saw in Irish freedom the first spark of a Workers Republic. Even the most unlikely figures—like the ageing Gaelic revivalist Eoin MacNeill, who initially opposed the Rising—found themselves swept up in the fervour of the moment.
A comprehensive overview of them can be found here.
This was no narrow sectarian revolt, no petty uprising of disgruntled malcontents. It was, rather, a crystallisation of the Irish nation itself—flawed, fractious, militarily disastrous, yet undeniably alive.
The rebels were not merely fighting against something (though God knows they had grievances enough), but for something: an Ireland in which shopkeepers and scholars, dockworkers and dreamers, might all claim an equal share. The quixotic nature of such a vision did not make it any less worthy. Indeed, even WB Yeats, who supported the rebels' aim but disagreed with their method, was both moved and troubled by the events of that week.
Nor were they without their critics among the people they were fighting for. Upon their march to Kilnainham jail, many were jeered and spat on by Dubliners angered by their actions. Their executions caused a massive sea change in opinion, however, and the Irish drive for self-governance only accelerated in the coming years.
As a writer and poet, the irony has never escaped my notice that so many of the Rising’s leaders were, in their private lives, men of gentle disposition. Pearse wrote sentimental verse about God and Ireland; Thomas MacDonagh was a beloved university lecturer and playwright; Joseph Plunkett composed delicate love poems even as he planned for combat. Michael Mallin saw service in the British Army. Roger Casement had reported on atrocities committed by the Belgian government in the Congo.
There was, in their rebellion, something almost medieval—a chivalric defiance in the face of overwhelming force. They knew they would lose. They went forward anyway.
In the end, of course, the British did what empires always do when challenged: they responded with overwhelming violence, executing the ringleaders with a haste that bordered on panic.
But in their desperation to extinguish the rebellion, they only ensured its immortality. The Easter Rising did not succeed in 1916, but it did something far more enduring—it made the idea of an independent Ireland inevitable.
And for that, its participants, in all their glorious contradictions, deserve not just our remembrance, but our reverence.
Nor have their goals been fully realised. Ireland has much to answer for in terms of safeguarding the dignity of its citizens today. The ideals of the 1916 Proclamation continue to serve as a guiding principle.
This poem is a decade old, as of this year. I hope you like it:
Sentence
The schoolmaster’s voice rattled in his throat
as he gave the order for surrender to be total
and the last mouthful of ash scrubbed the air.
The tobacconist removed his eyeglasses
before the blindfold gripped his cranium
and a promise of peace blazed on the wind.
The assistant headmaster cleared his throat
before addressing the court-martial
and midsummer magma waxed to oblivion.
The journalist’s lungs groped for breath,
his signature now the rubric
of a still-standing corporation flat.
The chemist’s assistant chewed the order,
his mind burnt out and rabid
as a convict escaped from prison.
The proof-reader lost the words that steeled him,
his screams leaping skyward as sparks
leap from the bunched flame.
The schoolmaster’s brother was condemned
by his surname, the only man
to die with a plea of his guilt on his lips.
The maligned major refused the blindfold,
his memory of Transvaal muzzles enough
to keep him calm at eternity‘s doorway.
The accountant’s ears ring with proclamation,
rhetoric intoned in the original Irish,
hopes to return the smoking salute.
The silk weaver cut the buttons from his tunic
and placed it in the envelope addressed
to his wife, for the end of all things earthly.
The railway clerk, dog-tired, repeats
the prayers he whispered in his cell,
making little worry or wonderment of them.
The school’s drill instructor died
at dawn, the eye of an unexpected
hurricane bleeding with the sunset.
The farmer insisted that no Irishmen
be among his chosen firing squad, his eye
clearer than rotgut on the green.
The editor-in-chief walked with a cane
even into the fire without delay or denial,
like a bell tower shaken by its own knell
The union leader is strapped to a chair
gangrene starting to eat into his heels;
dragons spread their wings like hot raiment.
The humanitarian stands before the noose
like an actor readying for a soliloquy, eyes shut,
final, each life sprawled in murderous reverse.