The Mother
I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge
My two strong sons that I have seen go out
To break their strength and die, they and a few,
In bloody protest for a glorious thing,
They shall be spoken of among their people,
The generations shall remember them,
And call them blessed;
But I will speak their names to my own heart
In the long nights;
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth.
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in their coming and their going;
And tho' I grudge them not, I weary, weary
Of the long sorrow--And yet I have my joy:
My sons were faithful, and they fought.
Commentary
(1879-1916)
In any war, people are killed; soldiers are killed. Right now, there are American and British and Australian mothers who wonder if they will see their sons again. This poem is from a different war and a different time, but the sentiments outlive time and place.
The poem was written the night before Pearse’s execution by firing squad; his brother was executed some days later.
It is customary now to decry the kind of patriotism which Pearse represented. His sincere love for his country has been corrupted by the savagery of the IRA, just as his idea of the necessity of blood sacrifice (cf Yeats “There’s nothing but our own red blood / Can make a right Rose Tree.”) has been corrupted by suicide bombers. Yet he was a young man of great piety, a poet of some substance and an educator before that word was properly understood. His oration over the grave of the old Fenian O’Donovan Rossa bears comparison with any example of oratory anywhere. His sense of fierce love of Ireland he inherited from his Irish mother; his sensitivity to any form of injustice came from his English artisan father; if it is possible to imagine the best of both nations, it might be P H Pearse.
Any search engine will list dozens of sites devoted to Pearse and his writings.
— Frank O’Shea
Links
Biography: http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~jdana/pearsehist.html
And a picture: http://indigo.ie/~1916/pic_pearse.html
Another poem written on the eve of the poet’s execution is Poem #144, which makes an interesting companion to today’s
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Acynta · 4 March 2003
What’s so strange about that? If you think you are a victim, then you will never get out of the cycle of revenge and self-destruction. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that a positive attitude will overcome any/all obstacles, but I’ve watched members of my own (prosperous, middle-class, American) family destroy themselves because they felt sorry for themselves. No matter how terrible a hand you’ve been dealt, what you do with it is up to you. The past absolutely cannot be changed. The future is up for grabs. You can make it senseless, violent, and unproductive, like the past, or you can do your best to make it better. Self-pity is loathsome. There ought to be an eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not spend thy time thinking about how other people have done you bad. Thou shalt spend thy time thinking about how you are going to do good, and doing it.” So there.
carlynn
Mallika Chellappa · 4 March 2003
Let’s also recall Leon Uris book “Trinity” on the IRA, where the first person character
is undoubtedly PH Pearse.
It is certainly a tragedy that these vexatious problems persist, whether in the Basque region, in Kashmir, in Ireland, in Palestine
or in Kurdistan etc. Strangely many are not related to economics, but to ego.
“those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them”
In this context, destruction of writings, monuments etc does have the aim of rewriting history, and is thus pitiful.
Mallika
Amit Chakrabarti · 4 March 2003
Not to endorse any particular political viewpoint, but right now, there are also Iraqi mothers who wonder if they will see their sons again.
-Amit
Martin DeMello · 5 March 2003
Twelfth :) Eleventh is traditionally “thou shalt not get caught” (popularised, but afaik not invented by Heinlein).
martin
ruth · 14 March 2003
For me this is also a poem about really being a mother, and I marvel that a man could have written it. Regardless of what “cause” a child spends/loses their life on, then there must surely be a pride that the child makes a decision based on thought and judgment. I’m sure an Iraq or Palestinian mother may share my view.
Underneath every mother’s feelings about her adult child is the love she had for them at each stage of their growing up: you can’t show it because the child needs to be an adult receiving adult love. They can’t be burdened with the love you have for them as a 5 year old and the 9 year old let alone the baby against your breast, but it is still there underneath.
“But I will speak their names to my own heart In the long nights;
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth”
Weary and joy, weary and joy!
rosepearse · 16 August 2003
Well, since Patrick Pearse was my grandfather, I have to agree with the kind sentiment of Mr O’Shea. I beleive that Patrick was the best of many things. My regret is that I only know him as a legend. It woudl have been nice to have known him, even in old age, as my grandfather.
Regards
Rose Pearse. Keeper of the flame!
GB · 11 November 2004
I find this poem a tremendously moving one. Well done Frank for submitting it. It has some emotional resonance for me as my mother won a prize as a child at a Feis (or cultural festival) for reciting it. She she would recite it for us as children, sometimes seriously, sometimes almost making fun in her shy way of her own love for us as a mother, and always always much to our delight. I also remember sitting on the walls of the city of York in England about eight years ago on a gloriously hot Summer’s day reading a book of Pearse’s poetry for a few hours.But the poem would move me anyway even if it provoked no such memories. The fact that Pearse could create such beauty at a moment which must have been full of fear, loneliness and pain is a tremendous tribute to his character, and to the human spirit. The poem is remarkably prophetic as well. Pearse and his fellow rebels experienced quite an amount of contemporaneous abuse for their actions and would have been reviled rather than ‘blessed’ by many in Ireland at the time. Their execution provoked revolution, and ultimately an independent Irish Republic, but for the reasons Frank referred to, he remains a controversial figure.
Following Frank’s link out of curiosity, I also read Chidioch Tichborne’s poem (no. 144 ) on this list, written on the eve of his own appallingly cruel execution. It is also a poem that I find very moving, although it is a much more despairing piece. Still we can empathise with his feelings on his own life cut unexpectedly short, and on the transience of our lives on earth.
Well done Minstrels on your site. What a wonderful use to put the web to!
Best wishes
GB, Ireland
PS Incidentally, I am puzzled by the e mail from Rose Pearse. Pearse died without marrying and I am reasonably confident that he had no children.
Rose Pearse · 4 January 2005
Obviously I know more about this than GB Ireland does, but I would not discuss it on an open internet forum.
Wendy Richards · 30 March 2006
What on earth is this Rose Pearse talking about? Not only did Padraic Pearse die without offspring, he was reputably believed to have been gay. Methinks the woman is living in a fantasy world. (Even more so now that I’ve done some surfing and discovered that she’s apparently 39 - so how could she credibly be the granddaughter of a man who died in 1916?)
Wendy Richards
Rita Williams · 17 July 2006
have you got a copy of ‘ideal’ by patrick pearse please as my father is 89 and would love a copy
McCaulEll · 23 April 2007
Born and bred in Dublin and brought up on Padraig Pearse, even won prizes at the Gaiety for his play Isogan, his poetry etc. I too was not aware that Padraig Pearse left any children.