How Pearse Adopted and Created Images of Ireland’s Cultural Heroes
To Patrick Pearse , one hero stood out from the populated cast of Ireland’s finest sons and daughters: Sétanta, known famously as Cú Chulainn , which means the “Hound of Culann”. Cú Chulainn features prominently in the Ulster Cycle, and his strength and agility were unmatched among men. He adhered to a strict code of honor and exhibited fierce loyalty in every tale. He proved the ideal hero to Pearse and the boys at St Enda’s school. Pearse utilized Cú Chulainn’s image and his boyhood adventures to educate his young pupils at St Enda’s in what he considered the finest virtues of Irish manhood . This understanding of manhood had a major effect on the boys at St. Enda’s, and on the movement for cultural nationalism.
At St. Enda’s, Cú Chulainn featured prominently in the education of the boys. “The front hall in Cullenswood House was dominated by a fresco of the boy hero taking arms while around the mural was an inscription of [Cú Chulainn’s] famous choice between life and fame: “I care not though I live but one day and one night if only my name and deeds live after me.”” Pearse utilized Cú Chulainn’s emotional power and powerful example “of learning, gallantry, heroism, bravery and artistic sensibility wrapped up within a concept of the Warrior Boy Poet” to create his own class of warrior-boy-poets. Pearse was at the time of founding St. Enda’s the editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, a newspaper run by the Gaelic League. His work at St. Enda’s was an extension of his interest in cultural nationalism and educating a generation of warrior-boy-poets to carry Ireland into independence. While not all his supporters at the Rising in 1916 were educated by Pearse or even by his students, “St. Enda’s boys were a regular fixture in Dublin’s social and cultural life in the early years of the twentieth century and were considered, without exception, as emblematic of the potential of Irish manhood.” Pearse was able to use St. Enda’s as a model for educating nationalists in a deeply pervasive manner; from the ground up.
While it may seem sinister to some to focus efforts of cultural reform toward the education of children, there are real and pertinent reasons for doing so. For one thing, Pearse wanted to encourage bilingualism as a feature of the revivalist movement. On the topic of Cú Chulainn’s role, Pearse sought to create at St. Enda’s the sort of tutelage Cú Chulainn and the ancient Irish enjoyed in their education. Pearse spoke of fosterage, a system in which “to the Old Irish the teacher was ‘aite’, fosterer; the pupil, was ‘dalta’, foster-child; the system was ‘aiteachas’, fosterage.” He wanted to foster ideals of manhood in these boys, and teaching young boys at a school is the precise time to foster ideals; striking as the iron is hot, as it were. His use of gendered values is not, as Elaine Sisson explains, a monochromatic view of masculinity or even femininity. Cultural nationalists throughout the 19th century rejected imperialistic images of men depicted as “rough-hewn Fenian Gaels” as well as images of a cowering feminine Ireland cleaving to Britain for protection from the Fenian. Patrick Pearse attempted to reclaim the image of Irish manliness through Cú Chulainn and made strides into reclaiming Ireland’s femininity through invoking the famous pirate queen, Gráinne Ní Mháille.
Understanding the femininity of Ireland according to cultural nationalists is difficult; as Sisson points out, “The female image of nationalist Ireland is largely an image of dispossession, of disenfranchisement and of victimized oppression,” and that does not paint a complete picture. This focus on Ireland’s feminine helplessness forms a highly effective foil for the revitalized understanding of the Irish man as powerful, Celtic, and heroic. Ireland herself is a maiden in need of saving, and the Celtic man is her savior in this discourse. On the other hand, Gráinne Ní Mháille’s appearance in Patrick Pearse’s rewrite of the old marching song An Dord Feinne paints a different picture. As if standing in for Ireland, Gráinne Ní Mháille – here called by her nickname, Gráinne Mhaol – is pictured coming back across the sea to fight off the oppression of England:
Gráinne Mhaol is coming from over the sea,
The Fenians of Fál as a guard about her,
Gaels they, and neither French nor Spaniard,
And a rout upon the Galls!
Gráinne Ní Mháille brings a cadre of Gaels under her command to free Ireland; here is not a cowering woman in need of saving, but a powerful woman not unlike the Countess Markievicz who commanded men during the Rising. Pearse was able to extend his reach beyond understandings of masculinity in his efforts to teach the boys of St. Enda’s about Cú Chulainn; through his poetry, he gave breath and agency to a powerful female voice who cried for a free Ireland.
While Pearse gave Gráinne Ní Mháille breath through his poetry, he was also able to breath life into long-dead lungs; through an act of prosopopoeia, Pearse’s graveside eulogy of O’Donovan Rossa and his speech at the site of Wolfe Tone’s grave reawakened and repurposed two more voices for Ireland’s freedom. Patrick Pearse utilized “the epistemology of the graveside oration, itself an on-going trope of the republican movement in all shades of expression,” to captivate a particularly nationalist and very attentive crowd at the graveside of O’Donovan Rossa. Pearse was able to seize upon the opportunity to reclaim O’Donovan Rossa’s death from “a place of mourning, of public memorializing, where the focus is necessarily on the past” while simultaneously maintaining a “linguistic swerve towards a vision of the future which the dead person might wish to see enacted.” Pearse used the opportunity of O’Donovan Rossa’s death and the resulting gathering to advocate for a vision of Ireland Rossa may not have necessarily shared with Pearse. However, as O’Brien notes, “It is as if there is a specific valence in speaking from the grave of a respected patriot, and that the words are somehow more powerful when delivered from this location” which allowed Pearse to become “almost a mouthpiece for the dead patriot.” Patrick Pearse took a dead patriot in O’Donovan Rossa and reimagined the world Rossa would have wanted, then sought unity from his audience in pursuit of that goal. Pearse did something similar with Wolfe Tone’s grave.
When Pearse eulogized Wolfe Tone, he invoked dead patriots no less than at Rossa’s grave. The image of Rossa as a patriot who fought for freedom, and who was therefore forced to live out his days in exile, and whose body was carried across the United States back to Ireland in an elaborate and incredibly long funeral procession, represented a symbol ripe for exploitation. Pearse seized on that opportunity and reused that formula when he spoke at Wolfe Tone’s grave. Pearse advanced his own brand of independence which differs from the variants espoused by the two dead patriots, but the focus did not need to be on those differences. O’Brien points out that “what is being offered here is a form of revealed truth, a truth which is validated by the deaths of Irish patriots. It is their death, as opposed to their ideas, that is stressed as a motive force.” Pearse took Tone and Rossa into the same cast of Irishmen as Cú Chulainn and Gráinne Ní Mháille; symbols taken from a past which may not directly have advocated the same causes for which Pearse fought so bitterly, but served effectively to flesh out a cultural movement in need of heroes. These heroes all had a common enemy; the foreign oppressor.
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