Free Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín Page B

New Statesman . It ended, “all my priceless things / Are but a post the passing dogs defile.” The subtitle was “Suggested by a recent magazine article”. Moore and his ten thousand acres had been briefly put in their place.
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    L ady Gregory was in Coole for Easter 1916. On 27 April, when the Rising was still going on in Dublin but no clear news had come to Coole except reports of local unrest (which she always viewed differently from national unrest), Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats: “It is terrible to think of the executions or killings that are sure to come – yet it must be so – we had been at the mercy of a rabble for a long time both here and in Dublin, with no apparent policy.” On 7 May she wrote to Yeats: “I see in the paper today that MacBride has been executed – the best end that could come to him, giving him back dignity. And what a release for her! … I am sorry for Pearce [ sic ] and McDonogh [ sic ], the only ones I knew among the leaders.”
    Slowly, however, her attitude changed. On 13 May she wrote to Yeats: “My mind is filled with sorrow at the Dublin tragedy, the death of Pearse and McDonogh, who ought to have been on our side, the side of intellectual freedom and I keep wondering whether we could havebrought them into the intellectual movement. Perhaps these Abbey lectures we spoke of might have helped … It seems as if the leaders were what is wanted in Ireland and will be even more wanted in the future – fearless and imaginative opposition to the conventional and opportunistic parliamentarians who have never helped our work even by intelligent opposition – Dillon just denounces us in his dull popular way.” But fearless and imaginative leaders of the Rising were different from the local republicans in Galway to whom Lady Gregory refers in the same letter: “We have been calling out against those armed bullies who have been terrorizing the District for the last couple of years … just village tyrants drifting about in search of trouble.” The next day she wrote again to Yeats about the Abbey Theatre: “What I am rather upset by today is the putting on of Playboy at this moment – our management have shirked it for years and now it seems as if we were snatching a rather mean triumph in putting it forward just as those who might have attacked it are dead or in prison … I believe we should have done it but for the Rising.”
    On 20 August 1916 Lady Gregory wrote a crucial letter to Yeats, who was staying with Maud Gonne in France and having much amorous discussion with her daughter Iseult, to say that she had been “a little puzzled” by his “ apparent indifference to Ireland after your excitement after the Rising. I believe there is a great deal you can do, all isunrest and discontent – there is nowhere for the imagination to rest – but there must be some spiritual building possible, just as after Parnell’s fall, but perhaps more intense, and you have a big name among the young men.”
    The following month Yeats wrote his poem “Easter 1916”, whose listing of the names of the executed dead and whose refrain “A terrible beauty is born” had all the rhetoric of a nationalist ballad and offered a grandeur to what happened, giving a larger and more intense meaning to the “unrest and discontent” of Lady Gregory’s letter. (Wilfrid Scawen Blunt at first believed that Lady Gregory had written the poem.) Later, the poem would be seen as a part of the great change in Irish politics which led to the Sinn Féin victory in the 1918 election and the death of the Irish Parliamentary Party. What’s strange is that the poem was not published instantly in a periodical or a pamphlet or even in Yeats’s next volume, The Wild Swans at Coole, which came out in 1919. Lady Gregory realized how dangerous the poem was; she did not want it published. She had