The death has taken place of Mrs Elizabeth Dooley, only child of the poet Thomas Kettle, who was killed at Guinchy on the Somme in September 1916.
Mrs Dooley, who died on Friday, was in her early 80s. She had been ill for some time and had lived at the Verville retreat home in Clontarf for the past 20 years.
Her father dedicated his poem To My Dear Betty, The Gift of God to her. It is, in part, an explanation of his reason for taking part in the war.
It is believed to have been written shortly before his death. Mrs, Dooley's first cousin, Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien, said yesterday that Kettle may never have seen this daughter. He died on September 9th, 1916, while in action with the Dublin Fusiliers on a beet field outside the French town. His body was never recovered.
The previous day he had written to his brother saying how desperately he wanted to live.
A bust of Kettle was erected in St Stephen's Green in Dublin 20 years after his death. He is described as "poet, essayist and patriot" on the plinth, on which the last three lines of the poem to his daughter are also inscribed.
The poem reads:
In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
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 dice 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 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 herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scripture of the poor.
Mrs Dooley's funeral Mass will take place at 10 a.m. today at the Church of St John the Baptist in Clontarf. It will be followed by burial at Swords Cemetery.
