We meet to-night to greet a name
Symbolical for fifty years
Of England’s guilt and England’s shame,
Of Ireland’s blood and Ireland’s tears.
To mingle with the empty glee
Of laugh and cheer from English throat,
A new tone in this Jubilee,—
A strong, discordant, Irish note.
What has she done for us or ours;
What wrong redressed; relieved what pain;
That in her garlanding of flowers
We should conceal our Irish chain?
When on the dreary roadside lying
Were babe and mother faint and dying,
When heaped were nameless Irish graves,
When Irish dead paved ocean’s waves,
When every blast
That swept the mast
Of fever ship was moaning, sighing
The story of an awful crime
That ringing down the aisles of Time
Has filled the universe with song—
A deathless dirge of Ireland’s wrong—
What act of mercy, gentle, human,
What deed of grace to prove her woman,
What sign gave she that Irish true man
Could treasure in his heart to be
A token of her Jubilee?