Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. V. Browning to Rupert Brooke
Emily Lawless (18451913)Critical Introduction by Mary Augusta Ward
[Born in Ireland in 1845, the daughter of the third Lord Cloncurry. Much of her youth was passed in Ireland, in the country by the sea, where she developed to the full her remarkable powers of observation, whether of the animal and insect world or of human character. She wrote various scientific papers, and in 1886 published her first novel, Hurrish, which was followed by five or six others, by A Garden Diary (1901), and by a volume of poems, With the Wild Geese (1902). Her last years were spent in England: she died October 21, 1913.]
The “Wild Geese” was the name given by the romantic and sorrowful imagination of the Irish to those exiled sons of Ireland who, after Limerick and the Boyne, migrated in their thousands over seas, and fought against England in half the armies of the Continent. They avenged Limerick at Fontenoy, and were still—under Napoleon—fighting out the issues of 1689, when the nineteenth century dawned. The cry of Ireland to these cast-out sons of hers is finely given in After Aughrim (the battle fought after the taking of Athlone in 1691); and the yearning of the Irish fugitives for their lost country breathes in the beautiful twin-poems “Before the Battle” and “After the Battle”—the first expressing the hunger of the Irishman for battle, for revenge, and the native land he will never see again; and the second, a vision of the triumphant dead coming home at last to “the stony hills of Clare.”
But the noblest poem of them all is the Dirge of the Munster Forest. The forests of Ireland had sheltered the Irish forces of the Desmonds in the ghastly war of 1581; and in the devastation that followed on their defeat, the forests were not forgotten by the victors. They had given shelter to the rebels, and like them they were ruthlessly slain. The invitation of the Forest to her own funeral feast is vividly and masterly felt. There are some Elizabethan echoes in it, as befits its supposed date. But as a whole, it has the true “inevitable” ring; it could not have been said otherwise; and it ought to keep eternally green the memory of a brave and gifted woman. She died in 1913, after a long and wearing illness, in which, almost to the end, scarcely any of her friends guessed what she had suffered, so high was her Irish courage, and so indomitable her Irish wit and her warm Irish heart.