Background to Shadow of the Soul:
Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth
and Con Markiewicz
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer’s wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams –
Some vague utopia – and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another until time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.
William Butler Yeats
October 1927
Easter Week
Grief for the noble dead
Of one who did not share their strife,
And mourned that any blood was shed,
Yet felt the broken glory of their state,
Their strange heroic questioning of Fate
Ribbon with gold the rags of this our life.
Eva Gore-Booth
from Broken Glory
Heroic Death, 1916
No man shall deck their resting place with flowers;
Behind a prison wall they stood to die,
Yet in those flowerless tragic graves of ours
Buried, the broken dreams of Ireland lie.
No cairn-heaped mound on a high windy hill
With Irish earth the hero’s heart enfolds,
But a burning grave at Pentonville,
The broken heart of Ireland holds.
Ah! ye who slay the body, how man’s soul
Rises above your hatred and your scorns –
All flowers fade as the years onward roll,
Theirs is the deathless wreath – a crown of thorns.
Eva Gore-Booth
from Broken Glory
To C. M. on Her Prison Birthday,
February 1917
What has time to do with thee,
Who hast found the victor’s way
To be rich in poverty,
Without sunshine to be gay,
To be free in a prison cell?
Nay on that undreamed judgment day,
When on the old world’s scrap-heap flung,
Powers and empires pass away,
Radiant and unconquerable
Thou shalt be young.
Eva Gore-Booth
from Broken Glory