The Ghost of Roger Casement

Submitted by Matthew on 22 August, 2012 - 12:29

Roger Casement was a former British diplomat and anti-slavery campaigner who became an Irish revolutionary nationalist. He was arrested in April 1916, three days before the Easter Rising was due to begin, and tried and hanged for treason.

William Butler Yeats, perhaps Ireland’s most famous ever poet and certainly the best-known poetic chronicler of the 1916 movement, wrote this piece to demand that his remains were returned to Ireland.

Yeats’ politics – about Irish national liberation, and pretty much everything else – were shifting, and often confused. But this poem finds him at perhaps his least esoteric, in a much simpler “protest song” register than much of his other work on the subject, which is characterised by a romantic Celtic nationalism and a frequent use of imagery from Celtic mythology.

The poem’s simple refrain (“The ghost of Roger Casement / Is beating on the door”) helps develop this tone, which provides a visceral condemnation of the globe-straddling dominance of British imperialism (“John Bull”) in its high-colonial pomp.

The Ruby Kid


O what has made that sudden noise?

What on the threshold stands?

It never crossed the sea because

John Bull and the sea are friends;

But this is not the old sea

Nor this the old seashore.

What gave that roar of mockery,

That roar in the sea's roar?

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.

John Bull has stood for Parliament,

A dog must have his day,

The country thinks no end of him,

For he knows how to say,

At a beanfeast or a banquet,

That all must hang their trust

Upon the British Empire,

Upon the Church of Christ.

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.

John Bull has gone to India

And all must pay him heed,

For histories are there to prove

That none of another breed

Has had a like inheritance,

Or sucked such milk as he,

And there's no luck about a house

If it lack honesty.

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.

I poked about a village church

And found his family tomb

And copied out what I could read

In that religious gloom;

Found many a famous man there;

But fame and virtue rot.

Draw round, beloved and bitter men,

Draw round and raise a shout;

The ghost of Roger Casement

Is beating on the door.

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