![]() ![]() ![]() It seemed at the time, to the bellicose Collins no less than to the British Prime Minister Lloyd George, the only possible solution to an insoluble problem. ![]() The result was civil war.Įffectively the country had been portioned out between the Protestants of the North and the Catholics of the South. Under the treaty Ireland was partitioned, with twenty-six southern counties becoming a Free State, and the six northern counties remaining under British sovereignty. This hardy strain, which had endured for some eight centuries, came to its sudden withering in the Irish War of Independence, which ended with the treaty signed between the British government and Michael Collins’s I.R.A. The poem is a threnody for disappeared worlds-“Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!”-especially, although it does not mention it directly, the world of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. They have been there, the poet imagines, for decades, waiting for the blessed light to break in upon their fetid, liminal world: Wexford, a pair of travelers find themselves “Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, / Among the bathtubs and the washbasins” forcing open a long-locked door, they come upon a host of mushrooms crowding in the darkness. In Derek Mahon’s great poem A Disused Shed in Co. ![]()
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