Now to begin to name them I'll continue in a direct line,
There's John Mitchell, Thomas Francis Meagher and also William Smith
O'Brien;
John Martin and O'Donoghue, Erin sorely feels their loss,
And to complete their number I will include O'Donovan Ross--
yet there is in them a certain dignity, an intensity born of
continuity of purpose; they are roughly hammered links in a chain of
unequal workmanship, but stretching back through the centuries to the
Munster poets of the days of Elizabeth, advised by Spenser to harry
them out of Ireland. The names change from age to age, that is all.
The verses of the seventeenth century hallow those of MacCarthys and
Fitzgeralds who fought for the Stuarts or "knocked obedience out of
the Gall"; the eighteenth ended with the rebels of '98; the nineteenth
had Emmet and Mitchell and its Manchester martyrs. Already in these
early days of the twentieth the street singers cry out:
Mac Dermott, Mallin, Hanrahan, Daly, Colbert and Mac Bride
All men who for our country's cause have nobly bled and died.
Even Yeats, falling into the tradition, has put in a lyric the names
of some of those who died in Easter week, and through whose death "a
terrible beauty is born."