If suddenly a clod of earth should rise,
And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love,
How one would tremble, and in what surprise
Gasp: "Can you move?"
I see men walking, and I always feel:
"Earth! How have you done this? What can you be?"
I can't learn how to know men, or conceal
How strange they are to me.
_T. M. Kettle_
Thomas M. Kettle was born at Artane County, Dublin, in 1880 and was
educated at University College, where he won the Gold Medal for
Oratory. His extraordinary faculty for grasping an intricate problem
and crystallizing it in an epigram, or scoring his adversaries with
one bright flash, was apparent even then. He was admitted to the bar
in 1905 but soon abandoned the law to devote himself to journalism,
which, because of his remarkable style, never remained journalism in
his hands. In 1906 he entered politics; in 1910 he was re-elected for
East Tyrone. Even his bitterest opponents conceded that Tom Kettle (as
he was called by friend and enemy) was the most honorable of fighters;
they acknowledged his honesty, courage and devotion to the cause of a
United Ireland--and respected his penetrating wit. He once spoke of a
Mr. Healy as "a brilliant calamity" and satirized a long-winded
speaker by saying, "Mr. Long knows a sentence should have a beginning,
but he quite forgets it should also have an end."
"An Irish torch-bearer" (so E. B. Osborn calls him), Kettle fell in
action at Ginchy, leading his Fusiliers in September, 1916. The
uplifted poem to his daughter was written shortly before his death.