"Croon of the Mountain Woman"

Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)

“Croon of the Mountain Woman” manuscript draft

1916

Gregory translated many of Patrick Pearse’s poems in the immediate wake of the Rising. This is an early draft of her version of his “Bean Sléibhe ag Caoineadh a Mhac,” which she titled “The Croon of the Mountain Woman,” in which a mother mourns the death of her young son. She sent Yeats some of these translations, most of which focus on death and loss. In Pearse’s “The Mother,” a woman asserts that she does not regret that her two sons have been killed in a glorious cause, since they will be remembered and their names “spoken of” forever—lines that evoke the old woman’s promise to the young man in Cathleen ni Houlihan and that may have contributed to Yeats’s drafting of “Easter, 1916.”

This draft was laid in Gregory's copy of Patrick Pearse's Suantraidhe Agus Goltraidhe, which is also featured in this exhibition.