Ireland, poetry and the first World War

Ireland, poetry and the first World War is a story of contradictions, of contrasts and, a century later, of reconciliation. It should not pass us by that in Irish cities and throughout the countryside, the legacy of the first World War is no longer hidden. So, too, in the personal histories of many thousands of families, the experience of fighting in the Great War, of surviving or not surviving it, has been released into civil society and understood in a public way that was inconceivable even 20 years ago. Whatever about the politics of the war, the reality of Irish engagement is no longer a matter of conjecture or partisan interpretation. The lives and reality of so many ordinary families has been vindicated.

The ceremonies that marked the end of the first World War and the commemorations that lasted until the outbreak of the second World War in both capitals and provincial cities in Ireland are now integrating into a more complex history of the entire island and its complicated relationships with itself, with Britain and with Europe during the last century; so, too, with our literature.

Go back in time to, say, Katherine Tynan, from Clondalkin, Co Dublin, a good friend and supporter of WB Yeats, and her response to the killing fields of war in her poem Flower of Youth, and one recognises how this most popular of poems conveys the yearning of the time that all the suffering and sacrifice was not in vain:

Heaven’s thronged with gay and careless faces,
New-waked from dreams of dreadful things.
They walk in green and pleasant places
And by the crystal water springs
Who dreamt of dying and the slain,
And the fierce thirst and the strong pain.

Yeats, however, was having none of it. Asked to contribute a poem for an anthology published in aid of those made homeless by the war, in typical contradictory fashion, Yeats both refused and agreed, by writing a poem about not writing a war poem. The six-line poem On Being Asked for a War Poem begins:

I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right [.]

(…)

As we know, many thousands fell and never returned to their families in Ireland, while others, the luckier ones, did survive and did return from the maelstrom. But return to what?

Post-first World War Ireland was also post-Easter Rising Ireland and was heading in a few years’ time into a revolutionary war of its own that would be followed by civil war. / Gerald Dawe, The Irish Times