I stood and pondered Con Markievicz in Saint Stephen’s Green last Saturday.
Standing at right angles to Tom Kettle, she and he mark the contradictions of Irish history: she the ascendancy Protestant who fought as an officer of the Irish Citizen Army in the Easter 1916 Rising; he the Nationalist Catholic who joined the British Army and died on the Western Front in September 1916.
Con looks impassively across the ornamental gardens once garrisoned by her comrades; her fresh face and groomed hair marking her out as coming from a prosperous background in a country that was filled with the direst poverty.
Neither statue offers much information about the deeply complex personalities they represent.
Given a copy of “Earth Voices Whispering” for Christmas, Gerald Dawe’s anthology of Irish war poetry, 1914-1945, it is a delight to find Cecil Day-Lewis’s “Remembering Con Markievicz”. Day-Lewis beautifully captures the life of the rebel countess:
Child running wild in woods of Lissadell:
Young lady from the Big House, seen
In flowered dress gathering wild flowers: Ascendancy queen
Of hunts, house-parties, practical jokes- who could foretell
(Oh fiery shade, impetuous bone)
Where all was regular, self-sufficient, gay
Their lovely hoyden lost in a nation’s heroine?
Laughterless now the sweet demesne,
And the gaunt house looks blank on Sligo Bay
A nest decayed, an eagle flown.The Paris studio, your playboy Count
Were not enough, nor Castle splendour
And fame of horsemanship. You were the tinder
Waiting a match, a runner tuned for the pistol’s sound,
Impatient shade, long-suffering bone
In a Ballaly cottage, you found a store
Of Sinn Fein papers. You read (maybe the old sheets can while
The time). The flash lights up a whole
Ireland which you have never known before,
A nest betrayed, its eagles gone.The road to Connolly and Stephen’s Green
Showed clear. The great heart which defied
Irish prejudice, English snipers, died
A little not to have shared a grave with the fourteen.
Oh fiery shade, intransigent bone!
And when the Treaty emptied the British jails,
A haggard woman returned and Dublin went wild to greet her.
But still it was not enough: an iota
Of compromise, she cried, and the Cause fails.
Nest disarrayed, eagles undone.Fanatic, bad actress, figure of fun-
She was called each. Ever she dreamed,
Fought, suffered, for a losing side, it seemed
(The side which always at last is seen to have won),
Oh fiery shade and unvexed bone.
Remember a heart impulsive, gay and tender,
Still to an ideal Ireland and its real, poor alive.
When she died in a pauper bed, in love
All the poor of Dublin rose to lament her.
A nest is made, an eagle flown.
Day-Lewi
Were Con Markievicz living a century later, it is hard to imagine that she would find much had changed.