Thomas Kettle

Thomas Kettle Poems

Thomas Kettle Biography

Thomas Michael "Tom" Kettle (9 February 1880 – 9 September 1916) was an Irish journalist, barrister, writer, poet, soldier, economist and Home Rule politician. As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for East Tyrone from 1906 to 1910 at Westminster. He joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913, then on the outbreak of World War I in 1914 enlisted for service in an Irish regiment where in 1916 he met his death on the Western Front. He was one of the leading figures of the generation who at the turn of the twentieth century gave new intellectual life to Irish party politics, and to the constitutional movement towards All-Ireland Home Rule. The Great War brought both of these and his life to an end. A gifted speaker with an incisive mind and devastating wit, his death was regarded as a great loss to Ireland's political and intellectual life. Tom Kettle wrote a poem neglected in the anthologies and ignored by his biographer J. B. Lyons. It was called Reason in Rhyme, composed in answer to an English plea to forget the past. According to Tom Kettle's friend, Robert Lynd, writing on hearing of Kettle's death at Ginchy on the Somme in 1916, the poem represents Kettle's testament to England, and expressed his mood to the last.)

The Best Poem Of Thomas Kettle

To My Daughter Betty

In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
To beauty proud as was your Mother’s prime.
In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
To die with death. And oh! they’ll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsmen shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

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