The Great Hunger by Lady Jane Wilde, (A Poem About Those Who Perished During An Górta Mór)

The Famine Year – Lady Jane Wilde’s cry from the grave of a starving nation

“The Famine Year” remains one of the most important poetic documents of Irish suffering, anger, and historical truth. Written by Lady Jane Wilde — mother of Oscar Wilde, and known in her own right as a fierce nationalist, a radical intellectual, and a woman who risked her position in society to speak for the poor — this poem is not simply literature. It is testimony. A direct accusation. A written scream from the shores of a nation left to die.

When we talk about the Great Famine (1845–1852) in general terms, we often hear cold language: crop failure, blight, emigration, poverty, “famine conditions.” But Lady Wilde strips away the polite terms. She removes the veil. In “The Famine Year,” she writes from inside the wound. This is a poem written as the horror unfolded — not as history, not from academic distance, not with comfortable hindsight. Lady Wilde stood in the middle of a country where mothers buried their own children in shallow graves, fathers fell dead by roadside walls, and barefoot children starved within sight of grain stores guarded by soldiers.

Because this is the part that modern readers sometimes still miss — food did not disappear. Ireland did not starve because the land was barren. The harvests continued. The cattle still grazed. The ships still sailed. And the ports still loaded grain, butter, cattle, pigs, and wheat for export to Britain.

Lady Wilde names this truth openly: this was not famine — this was a system. A policy. A decision.

“The Famine Year” is revolutionary because it refuses to blame fate, nature, or accident. She tells the world that Ireland was abandoned deliberately. The starving were not helped because they were Irish and poor — and therefore considered expendable. The poem attacks the hypocrisy of the British Empire, the moral pretence of the “civilising mission,” and the coldness of politicians who continued to feed markets while the Irish died in ditches.

And yet, it is not only anger. It is grief. The voice in this poem belongs to every forgotten woman who held her dead child and never had a grave to mark. It belongs to farmers whose fields were full of food they were forbidden to eat. It belongs to the Irish who died nameless, unrecorded, unburied — the millions who vanished into the Atlantic, the mass graves, and the footnotes of British history books.

Today, when we read Lady Wilde, we are reading a warning: a reminder that propaganda can bury human truth, powerful nations can hide crimes behind polite language, and those who suffer are often silenced.

Her poem still speaks for them.

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LYRICS

WEARY men, what reap ye?—Golden corn for the stranger. What sow ye?—Human corpses that wait for the avenger. Fainting forms, hunger‐stricken, what see you in the offing? Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing. There’s a proud array of soldiers—what do they round your door? They guard our masters’ granaries from the thin hands of the poor. Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?—Would to God that we were dead Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread. Verse 2 Little children, tears are strange upon your infant faces, God meant you but to smile within your mother’s soft embraces. Oh! we know not what is smiling, and we know not what is dying; But we’re hungry, very hungry, and we cannot stop our crying. And some of us grow cold and white—we know not what it means; But, as they lie beside us, we tremble in our dreams. There’s a gaunt crowd on the highway—are ye come to pray to man, With hollow eyes that cannot weep, and for words your faces wan? Verse 3 No; the blood is dead within our veins—we care not now for life; Let us die hid in the ditches, far from children and from wife; We cannot stay and listen to their raving, famished cries Bread! Bread! Bread! and none to still their agonies. We left our infants playing with their dead mother’s hand: We left our maidens maddened by the fever’s scorching brand: Better, maiden, thou were strangled in thy own dark‐twisted tresses Better, infant, thou wert smothered in thy mother’s first caresses. Verse 4 We are fainting in our misery, but God will hear our groan; Yet, if fellow‐men desert us, will He hearken from His Throne? Accursed are we in our own land, yet toil we still and toil; But the stranger reaps our harvest—the alien owns our soil. O Christ! how have we sinned, that on our native plains We perish houseless, naked, starved, with branded brow, like Cain’s? Dying, dying wearily, with a torture sure and slow Dying, as a dog would die, by the wayside as we go. Verse 5 One by one they’re falling round us, their pale faces to the sky; We’ve no strength left to dig them graves—there let them lie. The wild bird, if he’s stricken, is mourned by the others, But we—we die in Christian land—we die amid our brothers, In the land which God has given, like a wild beast in his cave, Without a tear, a prayer, a shroud, a coffin, or a grave. Ha! but think ye the contortions on each livid face ye see, Will not be read on judgment‐day by eyes of Deity? Verse 6 We are wretches, famished, scorned, human tools to build your pride, But God will yet take vengeance for the souls for whom Christ died. Now is your hour of pleasure—bask ye in the world’s caress; But our whitening bones against ye will rise as witnesses, From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses, For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes. A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand, And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land.