It falls to literature to venture into dark spaces on the map, where truth is elusive and historians fail, and to approach the endlessly contradictory landscape of Roger Casement’s inner world and textual life.. For years, the only such attempt was W. B. Yeats’ poem, “The Ghost of Roger Casement.” Yeats had blinked during Casement’s actual trial, refusing to sign the petition for clemency, appears to try to make amends some twenty years after the fact. It’s a strident poem, full of brio. It ends:

I poked about a village church
And found his family tomb
And copied out what I could read
In that religious gloom;
Found many a famous man there;
But fame and virtue rot.
Draw round, beloved and bitter men,
Draw round and raise a shout;

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

- Colin Dickey, “Dark Pages”