“Hush, O Mother, and be not sorrowful,
The women of My keening are yet unborn, little Mother.”
—The Keening of Mary.
TRULY it was of the Mothers of Ireland that Mary’s Son was thinking, when from the Tree of His Passion He comforted His own Mother with prophecy of the “keeners” yet unborn who, through the centuries, were to bear her company in her anguish, and weep with her for her sorrow and His most bitter death.
That knowledge—with so much else—we owe to the teaching of Padraic Mac Piarais. He gave us the first part of the lesson when he gathered us with him into the cottage of Mary Clancy, in Iar Chonnacht,[1] and bade us listen to her “keening” with Mary for her dying, crucified Son, and shuddering at the instruments of His Passion, and shedding floods of tears at the thought of His gaping wounds. He made us realise what “a precious thing it is for the world that in the homes of Ireland there are still men and women who can shed tears for the sorrows of Mary and her Son.” But did the teacher, himself, know then at what a price had been won for the mothers of the Gael their “terrible and splendid trust”? Or was it only revealed to him in the blinding flash of the illumination which showed him that his own mother’s soul must be pierced by the same sword which transfixed Mary’s? Certain it is that we had to wait for the completion of the lesson, begun in Mary Clancy’s cottage, till that most holy and solemn night when, as he waited, like King Cellach in his prison cell, for “his love, the morning fair”—and the flame-like gift it was to bring him—he wrote for his mother the exquisite prayer, with which he would have her, on the morrow, lay his own broken body in Mary’s outstretched arms. Then was it made plain to us that the mothers of Ireland have won the right to stand thus close to Mary, beneath the Cross, and to claim as their hereditary office, the task to minister to her in her desolation, because they, above all the other women of the world, have so often “seen their first-born sons go forth,” even like Mary’s, “to die amid the scorn of men—For whom they died.”
Thus the Desolate Mother, even in a world which has so largely forgotten the sorrows of her and of her Son, has always found, and will find, in the homes of Ireland, her faithful company of keeners. And who shall say that their ministering is less grateful to her, because while they weep for her Son, they are weeping for their own, and the voice they raise in woe is that of Rachel, who will not be comforted?
These poor mothers of our Irish martyrs! These poor Rachels! There is something in their grief which makes it a thing apart. Wives, and sisters, and sweethearts, who have given their dear ones to Ireland have felt, even in their most anguished hour, something of that exaltation which makes “the hard service they take, who help the Poor Old Woman,” a yoke more sweet and precious than any liberty. Like the men, of whose sufferings it was their splendid privilege to partake, the women who have shared their husband’s prison cell, like Jane Emmet, or who have walked with their brothers, even to the foot of the scaffold, like Mary Anne McCracken, or who have found death by their lover’s side on the battlefield, like Betsy Gray, “think themselves well paid.” But not even Ireland could pay the mother of the Emmets, or the mother of the Shearses, or heal the hidden wound that bled until her death-night in the heart of Bartholomew Teeling’s mother, or comfort Lord Edward’s poor mother when the roses of each recurring June were redly tragic with the memory of his blood-stained prison deathbed, and its sunshine was darkened by the memory of her boy’s agony. For the greatness of their sorrow, then, shall we not place them first, these broken-hearted mothers, in our tale of the “Women of ’Ninety-Eight”?