Appendix: Roger Casement: "They ... Blackened His Good Name"
Appendix: Roger Casement: "They ... blackened his good name" In the nineteen-thirties, the figure of Roger Casement, although on a lesser scale than Parnell, also provoked Yeats into mythic ballads. Actively campaigning for Irish independence through German help during the First World War, Casement did little to stir Yeats's imagination, as Sir William Rothenstein remembered: ... Casement ... was full, too, of the wrongs ofIreland. 'As long as he only bothers about present conditions,' said Yeats, 'it doesn't matter; but Heaven help him if he fills his head with Ireland's past wrongs. '1 Casement's fanatic hatred of England and reverence for Germany made others uneasy, and they doubted the effectiveness of his plans. John Butler Yeats, who had met him atJohn Quinn's, liked him, but noted that he "is about sick with grief over 'poor Kaiser' ".2 Writing to Quinn, AE described Casement as "a romantic person of the picturesque kind, with no heavy mentality to embarass him in his actions."3 However, when he was sentenced to death for treason, Yeats signed a petition on his behalf at Maud Gonne's urging, and wrote Eva Gore-Booth that "the argument for clemency is so strong that the government cannot disregard this argument .. " 4 When he was executed, however, Casement was not much more to Yeats than the unnamed sixteenth man of "Sixteen Dead Men" . To Maud Gonne, although his death was" a national loss' , , it was" a less terrible blow" than other deaths - and, like her, Yeats's imagination had been captured by other martyrs of 1916: evenJohn MacBride was mentioned in "Easter 1916" , and Casement was not.
[Show full text]