y sister and I traveled through the Irish Republic during the first two weeks of May 2004 and were quickly drawn into the deep well from which Irish poets derive their inspiration and imagery. The rivers, the rain, the warming gulf steam, tombs older than the Egyptian pyramids, mist over the Wicklow Mountains, beautiful hamlets and villages, urbane cities perking with coffee houses, Celtic spirals, Gaelic signs, Guinness beer and Tullamore Dew whisky, fairy rings in flat fields, holy springs, ancient abbeys and a stark history, along with many other places and things, all contribute to that restless whispering that John Montague (1929- ) refers to in his poem “Windharp.”
Our trip took us from Dublin and environs, across to Sligo, down the western coast through Connemara, the Burren, past the Cliffs of Moher, through the Ring of Kerry, to Waterford, and back to Dublin. (And yes, I kissed the Blarney Stone!) My goal was not only to have an enjoyable trip with my sister, but also to get a feeling for the sweep of Twentieth Century Irish poetry. (I decided to exclude the great Yeats, the better to focus on other, less well-known, poets.) To this end, I poured over several anthologies of Irish poetry, as well as some individual collections, and then created “my own” anthology, selecting representative poems which, for me, bespeak Ireland’s uniqueness.
What I find in Irish poets is a passionate intimacy with their country: a sense of its history - pagan, as well as Christian and contemporary; a vivid identification with the land – soil, rocks, potatoes, bog ponies, and so on; an often intense love-hate for a specific place - especially in older poets; a love of the Gaelic language; a connection with the relics and religion of Catholicism - viewed positively, negatively or humorously; a familiarity with death - natural as well as violent; and a devotion, sometimes humorous, to customs and familial relationships.
In Part I of this article I consider the sacred and the profane, the treatment of national artifacts, and the more gentle aspects of nature. Part II will look at the rest. But since in real life categories are seldom neatly separated, I try to show the interconnection whenever appropriate.
Everywhere you go in Ireland you are reminded of its continuous history from pagan times to here-and-now: from the Stone Age passage tomb called Newgrange to the ruins of the Boyle Cistercian Abbey to the Galway Cathedral. Patrick Kavanagh (1905-1967), one of my favorite Irish poets, shows the melding of pagan past and Christian Catholic present in his humane and humorous narrative poem “Father Mat.”
It is confession Sunday, and Father Mat, a mild priest (The knife of penance fell so like a blade/ Of grass that no one was afraid.) is walking to Church. In his being he sees ancient Ireland with all its unbaptized beauty for he is a part of the place as natural as a round stone in a grass field, quite different from the curate who bicycles by, a man of committees, the representative of Power, one for whom fear and awe are irrelevant. The second and third parts of the poem take place in community and in church: the May Queen (a pagan symbol) and the Virgin Mary look like schoolgirls, thinks Father Mat, and we hear the mixed tune of the hum of rosaries and of bees, and infer the presence of the Trinity – the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost - in the three men who shave before the same mirror. Inside the church a man prays to the source of Divine Love, Mary, for his lover’s return. Profane and sacred symbols and love intermix in daily mind. The fourth section finds Father Mat in the confessional listening to the sins pour forth, but cooling his mind, and the fires of Purgatory, by thinking of fields of fresh grass, horses, and cows, more in keeping with the Father’s being, as are art, the beauty of this world, and happiness. In Section 5, the choice between the beauty of this world (love, poetry, riches, happiness, art) as signified by the ecstatic Venus (Venus was in the western sky) and the narrower path trod by the domestic Virgin and Her child is posed. The poet does not resolve the tension, and in not doing so presents the reality of the Catholic ethos in Ireland.
If Father Mat is in touch with the homespun realities of daily life, the priest in “Saint Margaret of Cortona” by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin (1942- ) is not. (Ní Chulleanáin is one of many Irish poets who originally write in Gaelic.) This poem is about a priest’s annual speech of praise for the patron saint of Lock Hospital in Dublin, St. Margaret of Cortona, an Italian saint who had a child out of wedlock, a child that is never mentioned by the priest. Instead, A pause opens its jaws/ In the annual panegyric,/ The word “whore” prowling silent/ Up and down the long aisle. St. Margaret, the poet observes, was not transformed by her own death, but by the death of her lover, her child’s father, and her subsequent vilification – …the names clustered and hung/ Out of her shoulderbones/Like children swinging from a father’s arm,/ Their tucked-up feet skimming over the ground. Sad humor indeed.
But humor can hardly be an ingredient at all when a religious poet feels his immortal soul is at stake. Seán Ó Ríordáin‘s (1917-1977) “Mount Melleray” is a poem that proves wrong the critics who dismiss religious poetry out of hand as vague, didactic, etc. This powerful poem is about being a guest in a Cistercian Abbey in County Waterford: it describes a dramatic cycle of guilt (days of soft sin on my memory like sickness) , scorn for the monks (Deformed sunlight…/took the shape of a monk/…but The sun-monk was obliterated/And the word lost from his cheeks.), self-awareness and humility (These saints’ lives seemed sheet-white/Where ours were beetle-black), fear (Perspiration on the beads gripped in my hands,/My trousers stuck to my knees…), arrogance (They [the monks] filed past us one by one,/ A cemetery in perpetual prayer…), awareness (the individual is less than the congregation), contrition (I looked back at the waste of my life), recognition of the “measure, clarity, profundity, and harmony” of the celibate life, confession (I danced in Latin/And almost set foot in heaven.) spoiled by an over-confidence with a brief fall into hedonism, and scorn that is channeled into two powerful concluding lines: The days that will follow…lie hidden in God’s fist,/ But a drowning man’s grip on Melleray is this twist of poetry.
Ó Ríordáin‘s poem “Claustrophobia” is another tale of terror, a wager that pits a burning candle against psychological darkness: if the candle fails, the statue of Jesus will be in darkness and my mind will collapse/And terror be made for me and I’ll be darkness alive. But if the candle lasts until dawn, I’ll be a republic of light/Until dawn. Religion can be a source of exciting poetry – it always has been! – if the poet digs into the psychological reality behind the traditional symbols and shows a real life being lived.
In addition to the drama of priests and laity struggling for the soul, important Catholic artifacts have also shaped the ways of looking at the world.
In the hands of some poets, the sacred can also become the butt of humor. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s “The Real Thing” is about a relic supposedly from the “Brazen Serpent,” the perpetrator of evil straight from the Garden of Eden, displayed by Sister Custos on Palm Sunday. Mounted on a lapis lazuli frame, it is covered by a veil. After showing it, Sister – an innocent whose own history “is a blank sheet” - puts it away carefully, but the poet imagines that at the edge of the lace veil the serpent’s “free foot” is “kicking” “under the white sheet of history.” Evil is still abroad in the world, and a holy relic mounted and properly secured cannot define or control that evil.
I saw The Book of Kells, another incredible national treasure,
in its temperature-controlled room at Trinity College, where the curator turns
a page every day. It is an illuminated manuscript of the four Christian gospels,
probably brought to Kells in Ireland by refugee Scottish monks in 806 A.D.
to protect it from Viking raids. “Limits” by Eavan Boland (1952-
) is a poem that in size is similar to one of the elaborate initial letters
in the Book of Kells. Observe the exactitude of the description:
… the old monks/ made the alphabet/wild: they dipped iron/into azure
and/ indigo: they gave strange/wings to their o’s/ and e’s: their
vowels/clung on with/ talons … . The manuscript’s power was manifest
to the Vikings who left their frozen winters/and were lured back to the manuscript,
referred to imaginatively as their consonants; that is, they were lured to
what pleased the Vikings, which was probably the bejeweled cover, no longer
extant. Sacred objects have a pull on secular greed.
In a small land of rivers, rocks, mountains, and trees, where wind, clouds, and rain appear and disappear within moments, and temperatures flutter up and down in the batting of an eyelid, and special rock configurations have time-honored sacred connotations, and where the urban scene has yet to obliterate the countryside, nature is an obvious focus, and the animistic impulse - a tendency to give soul or spirit to the natural universe – is a natural component of that focus.
The River Shannon, personified, sings a lullaby to the salmon, in Nuala NÍ Dhomhnaill’s (1952- ) “The Shannon Estuary Welcoming the Fish.” The River, speaking like a mother, offers my phosphorescence as bed-linen under him to my favourite, whom I, from afar have chosen. Thomas Kinsella (1928- ) in “Wormwood” has an anguished dream about hearing a wooden echo escape from two trees that have twisted around each other like lovers but now have to be cut down. Medbh McGuckian’s (1950- ) “The Mast Year” is more a sociological guide to trees than a botanical one. The oak and pine seem eager… to populate new ground; the beech can carve itself an empire and makes an awkward neighbor; the birch fosters/Intimacy with toadstools, till they sleep/In the benevolence of each other’s smells.
Although for a time poets in America were cautioned not to personify nature, I feel these poems record accurately how humans interact with trees: we know they are animate, and we feel a kinship with them. I have always attributed this feeling to the empathetic imagination; but whatever its origins, it bubbles up abundantly in contemporary Irish poetry. Whether or not we maintain that “a spirit” literally dwells within is another matter, but it seems that our relationship to trees, and nature in general, is more animistic than we often care to admit. Personification is a comradely and, even for the Twenty–First Century Western rationalistic temperament, readily available form of the animistic impulse.
One trip to the Emerald Isle not being enough, I’ll return there via Part II of this article, where we’ll meet up with the likes of Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan, Louis MacNeice, and Máirtín Ó Direáin, with a tip of the hat to more poems by some of the poets we’ve already met, and a reverential nod to James Joyce and Sean O’Casey.
The more I read John Montague’s “Windharp,” the more accurately it seems to reflect Ireland; so here it is in its entirety:
The sounds of Ireland,
that restless whispering
you never get away
from, seeping out of
low bushes and grass,
heatherbells and fern,
wrinkling bog pools,
scraping tree branches,
light hunting cloud,
sound hounding sight,
a hand ceaselessly
combing and stroking
the landscape, till
the valley gleams
like the pile upon
a mountain pony’s coat.