The third week of May and I’m already beginning to grieve. The year is in its youth but not for much longer. Yes, June is ahead but already the feeling is of newness disappearing: of all that freshness and gentle green becoming harder.
I’m reminded of words from that melancholic soul Patrick Pearse and his line in The Wayfarer on how “the beauty of the world doth make me sad,/This beauty that will pass.”
I don’t think he liked this life very much.
He listed “Things young and happy”, continuing “and then my heart hath told me: These will pass,/ Will pass and change, will die and be no more, /Things bright and green, things young and happy;/ And I have gone upon my way/ Sorrowful.”
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He was executed on May 3rd, 110 years ago, and still young at 36. You have to wonder whether he had a personal death wish too in leading that minority within a minority to the GPO on Easter Monday 1916.
It followed his declaration of a Republic on behalf of the people of Ireland, having looked into his own heart to determine what the Irish people wanted. Some are still at that today. So doing, Pearse and his followers set Irish republicanism on the violent path it trod for most of the 20th century.
Had the British not obliged by granting his and their death wish, making martyrs of them all in 1916, it is probable the last century on this island would have been more peaceful and, certainly, less bloody.
Instead, a cult was created around them, seducing many young men (mainly) of 20 to further slaughter and martyrdom. God save Ireland from such heroes, wasting their young lives and others’.
It is claimed that in 1931 George Bernard Shaw lamented that “youth is wasted on the young”. Then 73, the old codger lived another 21 years.
Still, it is hard to disagree that another big design fault in this existence is that we grow older. How much more sensible it would be were we allowed the wisdom of age and experience in youth.
How much more we would suck the marrow from life then too and how so very few of us would be seduced by “ignorant men [of] most violent ways”.
Lament, from Latin lamentum, for “expression of sorrow or grief”.
