Lady Gregory's Toothbrush by Colm Tóibín

uncorked the genie by writing to Yeats in August about his future role and influence; now she sought to put it back in the bottle. On 28 March 1917, six months after he wrote the poem, when Yeats arranged to have twenty-five copies printed to be distributed to close friends, he wrote to the printer: “Please be very careful with the Rebellion poem. Lady Gregory asked me not to send it toyou until we had finalized our dispute with the authorities about the Lane pictures. She was afraid of it getting about and damaging us and she is not timid.”
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    L ady Gregory’s nephew Hugh Lane, to whom she had become very close, died when the Lusitania was torpedoed off the coast of Cork in May 1915. Bernard Shaw was staying at Coole, and her son Robert was home on leave. Shaw asked her what he could do to help her. “I said I longed to be alone, to cry, to moan, to scream if I wished. I wanted to be out of hearing and out of sight. Robert came and was terribly distressed, he had been so used to my composure.”
    Lane’s will, which was found in London, left his valuable collection of pictures to the National Gallery of England . But, on Lady Gregory’s suggestion, his desk at the National Gallery in Dublin, where he had become director in 1914, was searched and an unsigned codicil to his will was found which left the paintings to Dublin and named Lady Gregory as his trustee. She worked until her death in 1932 to get the paintings back to Ireland. Over and over she travelled to London to see the great and the good; she tirelessly wrote letters and lobbied. (She even wrote to George Moore.) She enlisted the help of Sir Edward Carson and Augustine Birrell, who had been Chief Secretary in Dublinduring the 1916 Rising. All her old contacts in London came in useful. She had moved in the 1890s from unionism to support for Home Rule. Now, after the Rising, she was in the rebel camp, even though her son Robert was in the British Army and part of a world that viewed the Rising as an abject piece of treachery, even though she was in London talking as though nothing had changed.
    The publication of “Easter 1916” would threaten the ambiguity under which she had sheltered. The plays she and Yeats had written had not been a direct celebration of recent rebellion; they were rooted in history and could be read as metaphor. And even though “Easter 1916” had several passages that expressed ambivalence about the Rising, the poem’s listing of the leaders and its refrain were what people would notice and remember. On Lady Gregory’s insistence, the poem’s publication was deferred; although Yeats read it aloud a few times to friends, it did not appear in print until 17 March 1919, when The Irish Commonwealth, a Dublin magazine, quoted the first sixteen lines, and it was not published in England until October 1920, when it appeared in its entirety in The New Statesman.
    Four of her Persse nephews were killed in the fighting in France. In almost all of her letters to Yeats during the war, there was some reference to her son Robert, who had become a pilot. In June 1917 she wrote: “Robert, having been given Legion of Honour for France, has now beengiven military cross for England. He must have been very brave and very efficient out there. He is at Salisbury now, trying out the new machines and there is to be flight instruction for a bit.” Later, she wrote about the new planes: “The machines are single-engine, he will be alone with a machine gun.” In October 1917 she wrote: “And there is only half of me here while Robert is in danger. He is in France this week inspecting aerodromes, flying from one to another.” Soon, he moved to Italy. In December 1917 she wrote: “We had a cheery letter from Robert from Milan … There is danger everywhere.”
    A month later, Robert was shot down in error by an Italian pilot as he returned from a mission, although Lady Gregory