Victorian

Emily Lawless

1845–1913


The Hon. Emily Lawless (1845–1913) was an Irish novelist, poet and naturalist, born in County Kildare, daughter of Lord Cloncurry. She is best known for her novels Hurrish and Grania and for the poems of With the Wild Geese, and her love of the Burren and the Atlantic coast of the west of Ireland runs through her verse.

The poems here are taken from The Inalienable Heritage, and Other Poems, privately printed in 1914, the year after her death. Many were written during her last years of illness. Edith Sichel’s preface to the volume is not reproduced.

  1. The Inalienable Heritage
  2. Yet Wherefore
  3. The Third Trumpet: A Ballad of Meath, May 1, 1654
  4. From the Burren
  5. Resurgence
  6. Night Sounds
  7. To a Hurrying Streamlet
  8. Is It Love? Is It Hate?
  9. A Reproach
  10. To a Forgotten Triton
  11. To That Rare and Deep-Red Burnet-Moth Only to Be Met with in the Burren
  12. A Garden
  13. A Wave
  14. Yet a Little Longer
  15. Evening
  16. The Shadow on the Shore
  17. A Bog-Filled Valley
  18. A Midnight Vision
  19. Vagrants
  20. A Sphinx
  21. A Parallel
  22. Memories
  23. Emigrants
  24. Wide Is the Shannon
  25. The Awaited Leader
  26. The Gamblers
  27. A Famine Cry
  28. Gone!
  29. Wishes
  30. To a Woman Spinning
  31. Spain
  32. Spain: A Drinking Song
  33. Afterword
  34. Dirge of the Munster Forest
  35. After Aughrim
  36. Fontenoy, 1745

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