Pearse wrote some short stories in the Irish language, the most important of which have been collected and translated in a dual-language book edited by Desmond Maguire. As a writer, he shows a strong nationalist pathos which modern readers may dislike, but as he had learnt a marvellous Irish living in Ros Muc, even today the most Irish-speaking place in Connemara and all Ireland, he had a near-native command of the language and a natural fluency.
Arguably the best of his short stories is Eoghainín na nÉan or "Eoineen of the Birds", an allegory of the writer's own mind and mentality in the eve of the Easter Rising.
Among his poems, the most important is Fornocht a Chonac Thú, "Naked I Saw Thee", another allegory of nationalistically motivated self-sacrifice. Stylistically, it shows the influence of Classical Irish poetry - Geoffrey Keating, for example - rather than of contemporary spoken Irish language.