1916

While never wavering in her own pacifism she was always close to her militant sister Constance who kissed her gun as it was taken from her by her British captors in 1916 and her ambivalent attitude to the Easter rising is clear in these poems:

Grief for the noble dead
Of one who did not share their strife
And mourned that any blood was shed
Yet felt the broken glory of their state
Their strange heroic questioning of fate
Ribbon with gold the rags of this our life

No man shall deck their resting place with flowers;
Behind a prison wall they stood to die
Yet in those flowerless tragic graves of ours
Buried, the broken dreams of Ireland lie
No cairn-heaped mound on a high windy hill
With Irish earth the hero's heart enfolds
But a burning grave at Pentonville
The broken heart of Ireland holds
Ah! Ye who slay the body, how man's soul
Rises above your hatred and your scorns
All flowers fade as the years onward roll,
Theirs is the deathless wreath – a crown of thorns