StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XII, No. XVII

Tacitus Annals

15.44:

Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

MacBride's death left Maud Gonne unmarried, and after visiting Ireland in early June to witness the aftermath of the Rising, Yeats spent the summer with Gonne in Normandy, France. The fact that he worked on "Easter, 1916" while trying to woo her creates audible erotic resonances in the poem.

... the poem's incantatory commemoration of the rebel leaders must have appealed to Gonne's passionately nationalist politics ...

The poem seems to express Yeats's anxiety that Gonne, like the leaders of the Easter Rising, might choose to sacrifice the erotic to the political. Back in Ireland with Lady Gregory, Yeats finally finished a draft of "Easter, 1916" on September 25, but Gonne was not taken with it. Her letter to Yeats begins, "My dear Willie, No I don't like your poem" (White 384). She was not willing, perhaps, to grant the ambivalent value that the poem attributes to sacrifice in general and to that of the Rising's leaders in particular.

Nathan Suhr-Sytsma, Yale University, Easter Rising 1916

The Easter Rising (Irish: Éirí Amach na Cásca) was an insurrection staged in Ireland during Easter Week, 1916. The Rising was mounted by Irish republicans with the aims of ending British rule in Ireland and establishing the Irish Republic. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798.

The Rising was suppressed after seven days of fighting, and its leaders were court-martialled and executed, but it succeeded in bringing physical force republicanism back to the forefront of Irish politics. In the 1918 General Election to the British Parliament, republicans (then represented by the Sinn Féin party) won 73 seats out of 105 on a policy of abstentionism and Irish independence. This came less than two years after the Rising. In January 1919, the elected members of Sinn Féin who were not still in prison at the time, including survivors of the Rising, convened the First Dáil and established the Irish Republic. The British government refused to accept the legitimacy of the newly declared nation, precipitating the Irish War of Independence.

--Wikipedia

Maud Gonne (Irish: Maud Nic Ghoinn), my partner Sharon's great aunt, was an English-born Irish revolutionary, feminist and actress, best remembered for her turbulent relationship with William Butler Yeats. Of Anglo-Irish stock and birth, she was won over to Irish nationalism by the plight of evicted people in the Land Wars and was an active revolutionary throughout the period that spanned the Easter Rising and the Irish War of Independence.

Maud was born at Tongham near Farnham, Surrey, as Edith Maud Gonne, the eldest daughter of Captain Thomas Gonne (1835-1886) of the 17th Lancers, whose ancestors hailed from Caithness in Gaelic Scotland, and his wife, Edith Frith Gonne, born Cook (1844-1871). After her mother died while Maud was still a child, her father sent her to a boarding school in France to be educated.

She was a founder of Sinn Féin. Her son Seán MacBride, the first chairman of Amnesty International, won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1974.

The Gonnes (and Gaughans) run true to form (and occasionally The Tower).

-- Various Sources

The Irish Ghoinn is variously transliterated into English.

The name Gaughan is the reduced and anglicized form of the original Gaelic Gaoithin which comes from the westernmost Province of Connach, which includes the counties Galway, Leitrim, Mayo, Roscommon and Sligo.

Some of the common Irish versions are Ó Gaoithin (descendent of),  O’Gaughan (son of) and Gahan (descendent of O’Gaughan).

Gonne is an Anglo-Saxon derivation, based on the way the original Gaughan (Gaoithin ) name sounded to the English aristocratic ear. The final n is like ne with a semi-long e. Maud used that to act like a rebellious Irish woman with English sympathies.

Things like Gaughran or Gaughn are Ellis Island misspellings of the settled Gaughan (transliterated English) name.


-- Various Sources, including private conversations with Great Aunt Maud.