Memorial Ode to the Irish Dead Who Were Slaughtered During the Fifty Years’ Reign of Victoria, Queen of England
WE meet to-night to greet a name
Symbolical for fifty years
Of England’s guilt and England’s shame,
Of Ireland’s blood and Ireland’s tears.
To mingle with the empty glee
Of laugh and cheer from English throat,
A new tone in this Jubilee,—
A strong, discordant, Irish note.
What has she done for us or ours;
What wrong redressed; relieved what pain;
That in her garlanding of flowers
We should conceal our Irish chain?
When on the dreary roadside lying
Were babe and mother faint and dying,
When heaped were nameless Irish graves,
When Irish dead paved ocean’s waves,
When every blast
That swept the mast
Of fever ship was moaning, sighing
The story of an awful crime
That ringing down the aisles of Time
Has filled the universe with song—
A deathless dirge of Ireland’s wrong—
What act of mercy, gentle, human,
What deed of grace to prove her woman,
What sign gave she that Irish true man
Could treasure in his heart to be
A token of her Jubilee?
She came when but one spring had spread
Its buds above our dark decay,
Around, among, between the dead,
Her idle, pompous journey lay,
She saw a million graves, but shed
No tear to wash the sin away.
Before or since what ear hath heard
In all our years of dark eclipse
One feeble protest, or a word
Of pity from her queenly lips.
Nay, when our fearsome famine wail
Pierced e’en an Orient monarch’s soul,
And he stretched hand to save the Gael,
Her jealous pride returned his dole.
For she could watch the infant die upon its mother’s shriveled breast,
But could not bear a stranger’s gem to dim the jewels on her crest.
A faithful mother—so the bear
That rends the bleating lamb apart,
And brings it with her cubs to share,
Betrays a fond, maternal heart.
And oh, how many Irish lambs torn from their weeping mother’s side
By hunger’s pangs in roofless homes can mock Victoria’s mother-pride.
A faithful wife—from prison tomb appeals the strangled Irish voice
Of father fond and husband true, as even Albert—poor Myles Joyce.K
And many an Irish orphan sobs, and many a widow shrieks in pain,
At memory of the loved ones lost—butchered in this half-century’s reign.
Could a million of unknown Irish graves yield up the victims of landlord wrath;
Could the Angel of Life breathe into the bones that bleach the Atlantic’s lonely path;
Could the dead be recalled from the prison clay and ordered back from the scaffold’s gloom;
Could we clothe with living flesh and blood the inmates of madhouse and union tomb;
A parade that would stretch from Pole to Pole, from East to West over every sea,
Would shadow to littleness scarcely seen the fools who march in her Jubilee.
Then by the memory of all who fell in holy Ireland’s fight,
Through Famine’s pangs, by steel or rope, we lift our hands and swear to-night
To keep our banner still aloft, through calm and storm, through good and ill,
Until the blaze of freedom’s sun illumines every Irish hill.
Let those who will pay tribute still to alien laws and foreign throne,
Ireland shall see a Jubilee and sing Te Deums of her own.