Why do you live in Ireland,
Dr. Wilson?

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone .

It's with O'Leary in his grave

W.B. Yeats

Romantic Ireland is not dead:

It whispers legends in my head.

Pearse's Ireland, born in pain.

Lives in Ballinspittle, and Sinn Fein; (*4)

Swift "served human liberty"

With the sword of mockery

And in an ecstasy of rage

Wrote many an amusing page

Until his art, his great heart, broke

In one final mordant joke:

Looking at the Magazine

He saw what Buddha would have seen;

Fanatic Ireland, in spite of Joyce,

Speaks in every Ulster voice.

Yeats looked for faeries in the hills;

Joyce contemplated unpaid bills;

Yeats, the realist, wrote in fire

The alchemical heart's desire;

Joyce, the mystic, kept his head

Concerned with coin, and booze, and bread,

Finding a thousand epiphanies

In each day's banalities;

He wrote what each man thinks who sits

And reads the tabloid as he shits.

Yet in the style of each there lurks

Civility like Edmund Burke's.

I, who grew as com is grown.

In Hanrahan's mad song

And saw the river Liffey dance

In Brooklyn, in a kind of trance,

When I was only seventeen,

And yet believed what I had seen,

I was damned by Yeats and Joyce:

I swear I never had a choice.

At the age of fifty, then, I came

As any moth to any flame

Back to the land of Finn Mac Cool.

I know I was a proper fool.

Now twice a year, at standard rates,

I go and lecture in the States

And the one remark I always hear

Is "You grow more Irish every year."

Back in Dublin, every street

Once was walked by Grandad's feet

But this is the nails that pierce my hands:

I am alien, exiled, in both lands.

Romantic Ireland's all around me

To perplex me and confound me.

Rational Ireland we may see

In, perhaps, a century:

Joyce was often seen quite pissed;

O'Casey died a communist;

O'Brien drowned his brain in stout;

Beckett learned to live with doubt;

Synge disappeared into the mist;

It's a long and dreary list.

Yet Joyce, who looked at death and doom.

Answered them with Molly Bloom—

Yes I said Yes I will Yes—

And now perhaps I should confess:

Romantic Ireland can't be beat.

In the P.O. on O'Connell Street (*62)

I, a pacifist, feel pride

For the ghost of John MacBride, (*64)

For Connolly, and all the rest (*65)

Who gave their lives for the oppressed.

Who inspired Nehru, Ho Chi Minh

And all who fight the cruel machine

In Africa today, or Salvador.

And I, with genes of Lachlann Mor,

Know my soul is crucified

By fanatic Ireland's pride.

As Wilde found, wit is no defense.

Nor skeptic Joyce's common sense:

Defeat itself becomes a joy

In the last three bars of Danny Boy.

Cisatlantic notes for transatlantic readers:

4. Ballinspittle: a town in Kerry where, in 1985, a statue of the Blessed Virgin was perceived by thousands to move, jump, dance, make "imploring" gestures etc. over a period of about four months. The statue was finally smashed by Protestant iconoclasts who denounced the Catholic worshippers for "idolatry." Sinn Fein: a political party with an ideology so close to the Irish Republican Army that it is widely considered a "front" for the IRA. The name Sinn Fein means "ourselves alone" and is the slogan the Citizen shouts, in Ulysses, before throwing the biscuit box at Bloom.

62. The P.O. on O'Connell Street is the Post Office seized by the rebels during the Easter 1916 rebellion. To get them out of the PO, the British shelled downtown Dublin and killed thousands of innocent civilians.

64. John MacBride: See the interview with Sean MacBride.

65. Connolly: James Connolly, founder of the Irish Socialist Party. When he ran for Parliament in 1905, the Catholic Bishops sent out a pastoral letter to be read from every pulpit, announcing that anyone who voted for him would be excommunicated. In 1916, Connolly initially opposed the Uprising as "bourgeoise revolution," but after the British began killing civilians en masse, Connolly joined the rebels, was wounded and captured, and was executed by firing squad. His flag for the Irish socialist movement, the plough with a band of stars, inspired the title for O'Casey's great play about 1916, The Plough and the Stars.