Irish Theme

Was reading Conor Cruise O'Brien's memoir, vaguely in honor of the day, and I was amused by his description of Maud Gonne MacBride, the great, unrequited love of W.B. Yeats's life, for whom he wrote many a line:

When the husband, whom she loathed, was shot by a British firing squad after the Easter Rising, Madame MacBride - as she now came to be known - attired herself from head to toe in the most spectacular set of widow's weeds ever seen in Dublin, to which she returned from Paris in 1917. Her mourning for Major John MacBride was so intense that it lasted all the remaining years of her life (nearly forty of them), as far as outward appearances were concerned. I still remember her as I first saw her in that garb, about ten years later in Leinster Road, Rathmines. With her great height and noble carriage, her pale beaked gaunt face, and large lustrous eyes, and gliding along in that great flapping cloud of black, she seemed like the Angel of Death: or more precisely, like the crow-like bird, the Morrigu, that heralds death in the Gaelic sagas. That is how I think of that vision in retrospect; at the time I just thought: 'spooky'!