My mind is filled with sorrow
Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)
Letter to W.B. Yeats
Coole Park, May 13, 1916
Once she began to find out more about what had happened during the conflict, Gregory’s viewpoint shifted, with her recoil from the “terror” of disorder and violence outweighed by her recognition of the transformative effects of the Rising. She was quick to appreciate the extent to which the direct action of its leaders indicted her own and Yeats’s literary and cultural incrementalism: “Beside them we seem a little insincere, we have all given in to compromise.” Here she tells Yeats, “my mind is filled with sorrow at the Dublin tragedy” and that she has begun to write “some words of sympathy with—or sorrow for—those who [have] been executed.”
: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
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