In the Prison of His Days

Joel Richards

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916 (a bank holiday), a band of seven revolutionaries and perhaps seven hundred men ignited an uprising in Dublin against British rule. Doomed by nonsupport from the Irish Volunteers and the country at large, the rebellion failed after a week of bloody house-to-house combat that leveled much of Dublin's center and resulted in 130 British soldiers dead.

The rebels had solicited German aid, and a gunrunning ship, attempting a landing, was scuttled by its crew outside Queenstown harbor to avoid capture. The British used this pretext to quickly try the leaders by military courts-martial for treason and abetting the enemy. They were shot, rather than hanged, before Irish or British public opinion could be mustered in their behalf.

The iron chair leg scraped across the pitted floor.

The poet looked up from his notebook to his cellmate. MacBride's eyes were calm, the mustache fierce. Perhaps ill tended was a better word. Prison cells-these kind, without mirrors and with little enough light-did not lend themselves to careful barbering or even routine maintenance of facial hair.

Yeats was clean shaven, or had been two days ago. His hand rubbed over his chin, feeling the rasp of his own stubble. He was unused to this, sleeping in unwashed street clothes, the inability to shape his outward image. He was unused to the larger implications of confinement and imminent death.

"How do you do it, MacBride?" he asked in a low voice, and got back a cocked eyebrow of questioning, no words. Yeats waved an arm about him.

"Does soldiering prepare you for this?"

"It does," MacBride said.

"And death, too?"

"Ever at a soldier's back."

Yeats stood up, took a step or two to stretch out the kinks. A hangman's rope would do that as well. But this was a military barracks, and the others had been shot.

"Sheehy-Skeffington, that harmless, fey man! Can one credit it? The man's a pacifist and still they shot him. So why are we alive?"

MacBride smiled thinly. "Your literary reputation with these barracks types? I doubt it. Maud has been agitating and stirring up her contacts here and in London, I'm thinking."

Yeats nodded and tried to make sense of this. Maud Gonne had been and was the love of his life. She had offered Yeats spiritual love and friendship. She had married Major John (Sean) MacBride, choosing the organizer and leader of the Irish Brigade of the Boer army over Yeats. Yeats had asked Maud to marry him many times. MacBride had asked once-had it been with more decisiveness, less diffidence? — and she had accepted. Though long separated, in the Church's eyes the two were still wed.

What the Church would not put asunder the Crown might, and probably would. Little good that would do Yeats. He and MacBride would continue their link in death.

What had it been? The crowds, duty, or a lonely impulse? All these and the madness of what was Ireland.

What had led him to this tumult?

Sunday was not a day for selling pipes and cigarettes in Dublin. Most fellows might think a fine March afternoon the occasion for a walk on Stephens Green with a favorite girl, or a rougher time at it with the lads on the soccer pitch. Tom Clarke was rather too old for either. Too frail, some might say-but not many. Certainly not the military and constabulary powers at Dublin Castle who knew him well.

Tom Clarke was a naturalized American citizen who played a harder game than soccer. In his youth he had been convicted and imprisoned in London for bomb making. Now he was back in Dublin again, doing business in a modestly sized but highly aromatic tobacco shop on Great Britain Street that announced itself in Gaelic as belonging to T. S. O'Clerigh.

Another type of business altogether was being conducted this day. Present were seven rebels comprising the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood who would later elect one of their number, Patrick Pearse, as President and Commandant-General of the Irish Republic. Pearse was a poet, playwright and headmaster of St. Enda's Irish-Speaking School, himself possessed of a mystical but highly compelling vision of restoring Ireland to its days of splendor and heroism. In stark contrast was the trade unionist, James Connolly-hard-nosed and almost equally a socialist and an Irish revolutionary. He had organized and commanded his own Citizen Army, apart from the Irish Volunteers who made up the far larger body of Irishmen covertly under arms. Also in the conclave was Thomas MacDonagh, university lecturer and critic, and a dynamo of talk and action. Others included Joseph Plunkett, the movement's battle tactician and a man about to undergo an operation for glandular tuberculosis, and Sean McDermott, an upbeat but tough motivator of men.

There had been some good talk. Questions of military planning and logistics had been worked over in good Irish fashion. No amount of words, however, had been able to talk away the inadequacies in manpower and armament of the insurgent forces. Unsaid till now but hanging over the meeting was the palpable fear that this rising would likely be another bloody Irish failure.

Pearse addressed the matter.

"The Volunteers as a body will not be with us. At most we'll get those who are already IRB men, perhaps a few more. We need to rouse a citizenry of irregulars and turn them into a force of nature."

He paused and looked about him. Some of his compatriots stared back, puzzled and uncomprehending. Joe Plunkett opened his mouth in a roundfaced grin and spoke.

"You and MacDonagh are our academics, Padraig. I sense something in your line."

"Indeed," Pearse said. "I think we can get Yeats."

"The poet?" Clarke asked. "Are not the days gone when poets fought beside kings, devisingranns whose powers could shatter battlements and break spears? Would that such days maintained! Ireland is acrawl with poets-more of them than serpents before St. Paddy's time."

"And none better than Yeats," MacDonagh said. "He is not a great orator, but his words and reputation are power in their own right. He was one of our Brotherhood and a revolutionary in the days of the Centenary riots-he exhorted the crowd-and could be one again."

"A bit old, wouldn't you say?" Clarke said with a mischievous grin.

"Fifty-one to your fifty-seven," Pearse laughed. "As well you know."

"But are his fires as hot as Tom's?" McDermott asked. "Banked, rather, I'd heard. What makes you think we can get him?"

"I spoke to him in the street yesterday. He's restless and anxious, asking himself the kind of questions a man does in his middle years, without a cause-as yet-as ours to answer them. You know of his love for the actress Maud Gonne. It's shaped many of his poems these last twenty years."

"She married Sean MacBride," Plunkett said.

"MacBride's back in town," Pearse went on. "And Yeats knows it. Maud has left MacBride these several years, and Yeats still burns to win her. He fears that he must act rather than versify or play consort to her nationalistic schemes. He told me so. We can marry the appeal of his love for his country and his lady."

Clarke smiled. "You're a poet, too, Padraig. Very noble of you to bring aboard Ireland's best. He's bound to upstage you in that department." His eyes turned deep. "But by all means let us have with us a man whose words and presence will raise the nation. And chronicle our fight. But can we get him?"

"I've asked him to join us." Pearse looked at the shop's walnut-and-brass sea captain's clock. "He'll be here in ten minutes-2:30."

"Risky, Padraig," Clarke said. "How much does he know?"

"Nothing concrete. But he's far from a fool. I think he has drawn the true conclusions."