Easter Sunday, 1916

Below is an excerpt from Ella Young's memoirs, Flowering Dusk (Longmans, Green & Co., 1945), about her experience on that momentous day - Easter Sunday 1916. 

• Memorial to the 1916 Uprising Executions (detail)
•  
•  © Denise Sallee 2008.

  EASTER SUNDAY - A day of uncertainty. Parades, maneuvers, and marches of the Irish Republican Army should have taken place today. We hear they have been called off. What does that mean? They were to be the signal for the Rising. After so much hope and preparation, has the Rising fizzled out? No one seems to know. It is said that Eoin MacNeill himself has called off the maneuvers. A slack, uncertain day filled with rumours.
   Easter Monday. The sun is shining, but it seems to be the only brightness. Nothing is happening. It does not seem as if anyone expected anything to happen. Sounds of shots! Everyone tense and alert. Something is happening! I hurry from my lodgings in Leinster Road to the town Hall at Rathmines...From Rathmines one can see Portobello Bridge. One can see the Portobello Barracks where the English Tommies for some time past have been leaning over brick-walls and trading rifles, blankets, and other equipment, for bottles of whiskey, pressed on them by eager patriots...There is a stir in the barracks...More and more shots!...News begins to to creep along the knot of bystanders. "They say that Pearse is in the General Post Office, that they have taken half the city..."
   Seumas O'Sullivan and Estella Solomons come up to me as I stand listening with all my ears to every shot, to every rumour. "The telegraph wires are cut! Railway stations are in the hands of the Volunteers," says Seamus. "It is terrible and splendid. If it could  only by true that they are rising everywhere in Ireland!" ~ 
   Easter Tuesday. News is filtering in. Constance de Markievicz, second in command with the Citizen Army, held St. Stephen's Green Park all Monday...Pearse, with Tom Clarke, Connolly, and The O'Rahilly, has taken possession of the General Post Office...There is fighting in the streets. How much or how little, no one can guess. But certainly dead bodies are in the streets. ~
   Easter Friday. Phyllis MacMurdo came to see me. Since she is the niece of General MacMurdo, and strongly pro-British in sympathy, she is in touch with the military here. She had authentic news: Pearse, Clarke, Connolly, The O'Rahilly, and others are still in the charred and fire-thridded Post Office. They must burn to the bone or surrender. 
   Easter Saturday. Firing has ceased. There is a horrible silence. They are all dead - or it is surrender!
   Wednesday...the third of May...England is again triumphant. Newsboys are crying the news! I buy a paper, and lean against a wall to spread it out. 

 EXECUTIONS

Executed this morning: Patrick H. Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Thomas Clarke

The sun is shining. This is a day of the days of the Festival of Bealtine: the old Celtic festival of the coming of the Gods of Dana, the young eager Gods who took on themselves the burden of heartening and fashioning the Earth...Gods do not die - nor do heroes!

"THE DIRGE OF THE FOUR CITIES"

Image by Denise Sallee
© Denise Sallee 2015

In the first months of serious research into Ella Young's life and writings I discovered she was included in John Matthew's anthology The Book of Celtic Verse.  Thus began our collaboration which led to the publishing by Skylight Press  of
At the Gates of Dawn: A Collection of Writings by Ella Young.

The following poem also appears in The Book of Celtic Verse.  William Sharp, writing as, or through, Fiona McLeod is a fascinating story.  I have often wondered if Ella and William knew each other - have yet to see any proof but their poetry has so many similar themes and they share a romantic and mystical style.

The poem seems to have first appeared in the periodical The Pall Mall Magazine, Volume 32 (1904).  It was later published in The Writings of "Fiona Macleod" [pseud.], Volume 7, Duffield, 1910.  Anyone interested in reading more of Sharp's writings should try William Sharp (Fiona Macleod) a Memoir, Volume 2, Duffield, 1912.  William Sharp, Elizabeth Amelia Sharp. Duffield, 1910.  The William Sharp "Fiona Macleod" Archive at the Institute of English Studies,  University of London is also a good source for further exploration. 

THE DIRGE OF THE FOUR CITIES   by Fiona MacLeod

"The four cities of the world that was: the sunken city of Murias, and the city of Gorias, and the city of Finias,
and the city of Falias." 
                                                                    

(Ancient Gaelic Chronicle.)

Finias and Falias,

Where are they gone?

Does the wave hide Murias--

Does Gorias know the dawn?

Does not the wind wail

In the city of gems?

Do not the prows sail

Over fallen diadems

And spires of dim gold

And the pale palaces

Of Murias, whose tale was told

Ere the world was old?

Do women cry Alas! . . .

Beyond Finias?

Does the eagle pass

Seeing but her shadow on the grass

Where once was Falias:

And do her towers rise

Silent and lifeless to the frozen skies?

And do whispers and sighs

Fill the twilights of Finias

With love that has not grown cold

Since the days of old?

Hark to the tolling of bells

And the crying of wind!

The old spells

Time out of mind,

They are crying before me and behind!

I know now no more of my pain,

But am as the wandering rain

Or as the wind's shadow on the grass

Beyond Finias of the Dark Rose:

Or, 'mid the pinnacles and still snows

Of the Silence of Falias

I go: or am as the wave that idly flows 

Where the pale weed in songless
thickets grows

Over the towers and fallen palaces

Where the Sea-city was,

The city of Murias.

"Unicorn"

 

 

 

Unicorn  by Ella Young

Forth from the Wood of Dreams last night,
(The ensorcelled Wood that my heart fears.)
There came a Unicorn more white
Than blossoming first the thorn appears:
A lovely perilous sight
Lifting desirous lips to berries of the yew-tree,
The poison-sweet red berries of the yew!

All as it went the way was flowered
With slender lilies honey-dowered:
It crushed them head by scarlet head
Nor grieved the last that they were dead
Nor that its stained hooves were red,
Lifting desirous lips to berries of the yew-tree,
The poison-sweet red berries of the yew.

Published:  Horn Book, March 1939 and Smoke of Myrrh, 1950

Sarah Orne Jewett

I discovered the New England author Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) in the early 1980's and this passage has stayed with me all these years. Each time I walk in a garden, or work with my own herbs, I remember her words and the vivid imagery she evokes.

La Joie des Choses, 1884 by Armand Point Musée des beaux-arts de Nancy

“...but the discovery was soon made that Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be.“
From: The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1896 by Sarah Orne Jewett

In Celebration of Lughnasadh

STORIES FROM CELTIC WONDER TALES by Ella Young

Photograph by Denise Sallee
© Denise Sallee 2010

(1910 )
from the tale  THE COMING OF LUGH

The Spear was in the lake then. Great clouds of steam rose about it from the black water. Out of the hissing steam Demons of the Air were born. The Demons were great and terrible. There was an icy wind about them. They found their way into Ireland. They took prey there in spite of the De Danaans. They made broad tracks for themselves. The Fomor followed in their tracks. It was then that misfortune came to the De Danaans. The people of the Fomor got the better of the De Danaans. They took the Cauldron of Plenty and the Magic Harp from the Dagda. They made themselves lords and hard rulers over the De Danaans, and they laid Ireland under tribute. They were taking tribute out of it ever and again till Lugh Lauve Fauda came. 'Twas he that broke the power of the Fomor and sent the three sons of Dana for the Spear. They had power to draw it out of the lake. They gave it to Lugh, and it is with him it is now, and 'tis he will set it up again in the middle of Ireland before the end of the world.



 At the Gates of Dawn: A Collection of Writings by Ella Young. Edited by John Matthews & Denise Sallee 

The Sea-Kings Daughters

Image by Denise Sallee
© Denise Sallee 2015

From  THE MASK TOOTHED WITH JACINTH by Ella Young.
Included in:

At the Gates of Dawn: A Collection of Writings by Ella Young.

Returning

Photo by Nuala McNulty. Image by Denise Sallee. 
© Denise Sallee 2015

Ella Young is a character in a novel I am writing. It is very exciting to bring her to life in this way. She has influenced my life in so many ways over the last eight years, not least of all by sending me off to live in Ireland for one very precious year.

I no longer live in an old stone cottage on a hill in North Leitrim. Instead, I find myself in a cozy space on a hill in California where the Pacific Ocean stretches before me to the west and to the south the Santa Lucia Mountains roll down to Big Sur.

Hawks and vultures circle above me like dark shadows against the blue sky. Tall pines stand sentry as they sing their ancient songs, their highest branches nodding to me as I walk among the quail and the rabbits and tall grasses of my meadow.

After a life time as a nomad is it possible to grow roots? Do they even want to find a home here?

Sometimes life hands you circumstances that leave you with little room for negotiation. Responsibilities finally outweigh the dream chasing. And perhaps, when the chasing has ceased, there is time to sort through what remains and hold close that which has always been the constant - the unwavering - yearning of my soul.