THE FAMINE YEAR Weary man, what reap ye? -- "Golden corn for the stranger." What sow ye? -- "Human corses that wait for the avenger." Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see ye in the offing? "Stately ships to bear our food away amid the stranger's scoffing." There's a proud array of soldiers -- what do they round your door? "They guard our master's granaries from the thin hands of the poor." Pale mothers, wherefore weeping? "Would to God that we were dead -- Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread!" Little children, tears are strange upon your infant faces, God meant you but to smile within your mother's soft embraces. "Oh! we know not what is smiling, and we know not what is dying; But we're hungry, very hungry, and we cannot stop our crying. And some of us grow cold and white -- we know not what it means; But as they lie beside us we tremble in our dreams." There's a gaunt crowd on the highway -- are you come to pray to man, With hollow eyes that cannot weep, and for words your faces wan? "No; the blood is dead within our veins - we care not now for life; Let us die hid in the ditches, far from children and from wife! We cannot stay to listen to their raving famished cries -- Bread! Bread! Bread! and none to still their agonies. We left an infant playing with her dead mother's hand: We left a maiden maddened by the fever's scorching brand:" Better, maiden, thou wert strangled in thy own dark-twisted tresses! Better, infant, thou wert smothered in thy mother's first caresses. "We are fainting in our misery, but God will hear our groan; Yet, if fellow-men desert us, will He hearken from His throne? Accursed are we in our own land, yet toil we still and toil; But the stranger reaps our harvest -- the alien owns our soil. O Christ! how have we sinned, that on our native plains We perish homeless, naked, starved, with branded brow like Cain's? Dying, dying wearily, with a torture sure and slow -- Dying as a dog would die, by the wayside as we go. "One by one they're falling round us, their pale faces to the sky; We've no strength left to dig them graves -- there let them lie. The wild bird, if he's stricken, is mourned by the others, But we -- we die in Christian land, -- we die amid our brothers, In the land which God has given, like a wild beast in his cave, Without a tear, a prayer, a shroud, a coffin, or a grave. Ha! but think ye the contortions on each livid face ye see, Will not be read on Judgement-day by eyes of Deity? "We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride, But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died. Now in your hour of pleasure -- bask ye in the world's caress; But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses, >From the cabins and the ditches in their charred, uncoffined masses, For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes. A ghastly spectral army, before great God we'll stand, And arraign ye as our murderers, O spoilers of our land!" -- Lady Jane WILDE ("Speranza") 1821-96, poet and nationalist. In the late 1840s Jane Francesca ELGEE wrote patriotic verse for the "Nation" as 'Speranza.' After the 1848 Rising she helped Charles Gavan DUFFY escape conviction by admitting authorship of a treasonable article attributed to him. In 1851 she married Sr. William WILDE (1815-76), internationally famous eye and ear surgeon, medical historian, statistician, and archaeologist. They had two sons, William (1852-99) a Dublin barrister, and Oscar (1854-1900), the playwright and poet. A leading Dublin literary hostess, financial problems after her husband's death sent her to London where she engaged in journalism, writing up some of Sir William's unpublished folkloric and antiquarian material Lady Jane WILDE's flamboyant personality and bohemian attitudes influenced her son, Oscar WILDE.