Emily Lawless was an Irish novelist, historian, entomologist, gardener, and poet from County Kildare. Lawless wrote nineteen works of fiction, biography, history, nature studies and poetry. Her work has been seen as an example of early modernism. // Emily Lawless fu una scrittrice di narrativa, storica, entomologa, giardiniera e poeta irlandese della contea di Kildare. Lawless scrisse diciannove opere di narrativa, biografia, storia, studi sulla natura e poesia. Il suo lavoro è stato visto dai critici come un esempio di primo modernismo.
More info on her biography // Sulla sua biografia: https://www.dib.ie/biography/lawless-emily-a4708
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IS IT LOVE? IS IT HATE?
Is it Love, is it Hate, this clasp by the sea of the land,
Entangling, swaying, revolving, escaping, past to the strand;
Escaping, yet never escaped, never utterly gone from reach;
Which is it? I ask and would know, as I watch at hand,
Here on the beach.
To-night they seem weary of warfare, these ancient foes,
Weary of love as of hate; of eddying kisses or blows;
Even as we, as I, grow weary of eddying thought,
Of the waves of the mind, of the soul and its foam-like woes,
Rising unsought.
The sea’s mood to-night has changed, has grown simple and mild
It draws in the land to its breast as a nurse draws a child,
It sings it a song wrought out of the moan of the beach,
Of the sough of the wind, of the tales of the waste and the wild,
Older and stranger than speech.
from Atlantic Rhymes and Rhythms (1898)
Le Ortique 
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