Lament for the Poets

This work is collection of three contemporaneous responses to the Easter Rising, imagined as an interconnected Aisling or ‘dream’—a genre of political poem in which the poet, asleep, sees a vision of a beautiful young woman, who represents Ireland. She tells the poet of her sadness at being repressed by foreigners and seeks the poet’s help to free the country. In this modern aisling, the allegorical spéirbhean (sky-woman) embodies the fierce spirit of the radical revolutionary poet Lola Ridge (1873–1941), who only laments that she is not in Dublin to mount the barricades (The Tidings, Easter 1916). In her Sojourn in the Whale, Marianne Moore (1887–1972) tells Ireland that the injustice and indignities she endured and endures are unbearable; Ireland has passed the point of no return by entering the belly of the beast.

In his Lament for the Poets, Francis Ledwidge (1887–1917) sees the spéirbhean in her incarnation as the sean-bhean bhocht (the poor old woman), mourning the loss of her ‘blackbirds’, which represent the Nationalist rebels—in particular, Ledwidge’s friend and fellow poet, Thomas MacDonagh—who have been destroyed by the ‘fowler’, the British Empire, and their loss is lamented by Ireland in her lowliest guise. I have used the traditional Irish slow air The Lament for Staker Wallace in the final movement. Patrick ‘Staker’ Wallace was an Irish freedom fighter, brutally executed for pro-independence activities in 1798, who gained his moniker posthumously, when his decapitated head was hoisted onto a stake to discourage further insurrection. As the original lyrics of this air are long since lost, Lament for the Poets serves as a contrafactum.
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