Pearse was deeply versed in this Platonic, mythopoetic mode of thinking. When he invoked the mythical hero Cuchulain as a symbol of Irish resistance, he made that ancient Gaelic champion a dynamic, live-action reality again. Cuchulain stalked indeed ‘through the Post Office’ and gave an extra, mythic edge to what otherwise might just have been another routine political uprising.

A few more years and a tradition where Seventeenth Century poets, Mediaeval storytellers, Fathers of the Church, even Neoplatonic philosophers have left their traces in the whole poems of fragmentary thoughts and isolated images will have vanished.