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From: "Jean Rice" <>
Subject: [IGW] "The Mother" - Padraic PEARSE (1879-1916)
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 11:03:33 -0700

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.

-- Padraic Pearse (1879-1916) wrote this poem for his mother just before he
and his brother went out to fight in the Rising of 1916. Per J. J. Lee in
his "Irish Counties," (1997) -- Born in Dublin, Pearse had a cottage in
Rosmuc in Connemara (Galway) which was the summer holiday home of the
schoolteacher-poet who championed the clandestine Irish Republican
Brotherhood and was later executed for his part in the Easter Rising of
1916. One imagines he must have often sat inside the small windows dreaming
his revolutionary dreams, and writing poetry, which was perhaps sometimes a
little on the maudlin side, an Irish trait. From that place you can see the
unfettered sweep of the great, granite mountains, empty and clean, being
casually stroked by suns that turn furze bushes into whorls of gold, and
lakes into pools of molten silver; a scene which inspired Pearse to write
these lines from "The Beauty Of This World" --
The little fields where mountainy
men have sown,
And soon will reap,
Close to the gates of Heaven.

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• [IGW] "The Mother" - Padraic PEARSE (1879-1916) by "Jean Rice" <>