n Part I of the article on Irish poets, I observed that they, gods in what poet Eavan Boland calls the “heartbroken pantheon” of Ireland, exhibit a “passionate intimacy” with their country, the only country in Western Europe, by the way, to experience the exploitation and insults of colonialism.

I went on to consider various themes running through Irish poetry, such as the intertwining of the sacred and the profane, the treatment of national and religious artifacts, and the more gentle aspects of nature. In Part II, I consider the poetic uses of Irish history, past and current.

What an interesting country it is! For more than 34 million Americans, Ireland is the ancestral country; for mythologists, the place of fairies, other kinds of wee people, mists, and fairy mounds; for jewelry makers, the treasure house of Celtic design in rings and pendants; for archaeologists, tombs older than the Egyptian pyramids.

For writers and other lovers of the written word, it is a small country with a spectacularly large literary tradition; and for medieval history buffs, it is the only place in Europe which did not have a so-called “Dark Age.” Ireland, in fact, in the 7th and 8th centuries, was the lantern of learning for Europe because, not having been conquered by the Romans, it was not subject to the degeneration that occurred when the Roman Empire fell apart. Indeed, Irish monasteries, having preserved the classical and Christian learning accrued over the centuries, sent missionaries into all parts of Europe.

But Ireland has had a “Dark Age” of another kind: first, the unconscionable exploitation by England; and secondly, its own deeply divided house: Catholics versus Protestants, Unionists versus Separatists; North versus South; Catholic Free Staters versus Catholic Republicans. This is the history that has produced the “heartbroken pantheon” of poets (and writers) that Boland writes about in her poem “Irish Poetry.”

England owned Ireland from about the 12th century on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin ‘s (b. 1942) hauntingly beautiful and strange poem “Lucina Schynning in Silence of the Night” takes place somewhere in Ireland, after Cromwell (who is remembered as a butcher who murdered countless Irish men, women, and children) has devastated the land in 1649 : “I washed in cold water; it was orange, channeled down bogs/dipped between cresses./The bats flew through my room where I slept safely;/ Sheep stared at me when I woke.” The “I” is reading by candlelight in a ruin with no windows, no roof, no food, only a clear sky and moonlight, with sheep and sheepdog as companions, and bats flying through the room. “Behind me the waves of darkness lay, the plague/Of mice, plague of beetles/Crawling out of the spines of books,/ Plague shadowing pale faces with clay/The disease of the moon gone astray.” The poet writes from the vantage point of a stunned survivor, an imaginative indirect approach to history.

Eavan Boland (b. 1944), in “How We Made a New Art on Old Ground,” reflects on two seemingly disparate subjects: the decisive Battle of the Boyne Valley, where the Irish Catholic loss to English Protestants (led by William of Orange in 1690) resulted in the suppression of Gaelic culture, and an exploration of the nature poem. The anguish of the history of the Boyne Valley, at least for the poet at this moment, is muted by nature, which disguises the dark historical period (“Silence spreads slowly from these words/ to those ilex trees half in, half out/ of shadows…” ). We can look at the arrival of evening in the valley and see it for itself, not just as history: “what we see is how/ the place and the torment of the place are/for this moment free of one another.” So nature can be an “art of peace,” covering up the torment of history.

Another consequence of British domination was the potato famine of 1845, often referred to as the Great Hunger. Forbidden to consume the wheat and other staples produced in abundance but exported to England and the Continent by British landlords, and faced with a potato blight, the dispossessed Irish (mainly Catholics) either starved to death or emigrated, often aboard ships referred to as “coffin ships,” to the United States and elsewhere. Ireland lost two million of its people during this time, either to emigration or starvation. Needless to say, the workhouses thrived. Although conditions improved somewhat in later decades, emigration from Ireland continued through the 1950’s, and it has only been since 1995 that more people have moved to Ireland than have left it.

This tragic history is still alive in the national consciousness. An example of the persistence of this history can be seen in Seamus Heaney’s (b. 1939) poem “At a Potato Digging.” In stanza one, the poet describes the stooped labor required to harvest the potatoes after the mechanical digger breaks down, the way it’s traditionally been done: “Processional stooping through the turf/Recurs mindlessly as autumn. Centuries/Of fear and homage to the famine god/Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,/Make a seasonal altar of the sod.” In Stanza II, the good smells and feel of the earth and the potatoes are described in the poet’s always wonderfully dense language. The potatoes are piled in pits – “live skulls, blind-eyed.” In Stanza Three the “live skulls” become the starved people of 1845, the year the famine started, many of whom were poisoned by eating the rotten potatoes. The good smells emanating from the earth and the potatoes deteriorate into the smells of blighted potato fields and the blighted lives that fouled the countryside. Sorrow was grafted onto the people “and where potato diggers are/you still smell the running sore.”

When is a poem on the famine not a poem on the famine? Probably the most famous poem was written by a poet of an older generation, Patrick Kavanagh (1905-1967). But is the poem “The Great Hunger” about the potato blight “Great Hunger”? No. The poem uses the 19th century potato blight as a metaphor to describe the depressed and poverty-stricken physical and spiritual state of the Irish peasant, oppressed by fears of the body, an over-protective mother, overly hard work, and a Church that dampens thought. (The poem is famous for another reason: it strikes a blow for the realism of rural life as opposed to the Romanticism put forth by Yeats’ Literary Revival.) It is a long and sad poem:

“Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned
       nor glorified:
The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled
       potato-field
Where the seed gets no chance to come through
To the fun of the sun.
The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.
Silence, silence. The story is done.”

Irish history, since the partition between North and South in 1920, has, up until the last few years, been a continuing “Dark Age” of violence and distress, tapering off only in the last few years: a Civil War led to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921 ( which became the Republic in 1949), and more recently, in Northern Ireland, the open hostility between Protestants and Catholics has been negotiated towards a peaceful settlement.

Heaney’s poem “Casualty” is an elegy for a fisherman known to the poet over the years as a man who gave him his first taste of freedom out on the water fishing together in the early morning. He was a man who wanted his drink of an evening, and the conviviality of the pub, one who went out during curfew and was shot: “He had gone miles away/For he drank like a fish/Nightly, naturally/Swimming towards the lure/Of warm lit-up places,/The blurred mesh and murmur/Drifting among glasses/In the gregarious smoke.”

Another powerful Heaney poem is about the change in death customs, from an era where death happened naturally to the present when violent death has become more common. Part I of “Funeral Rites” describes how the Irish family laid out the corpse, prepared so carefully by the women of he house. The ritual in which the young boy participated helped to transform him into a man. But Part II observes that the ways of death have changed because of the intense political and social strife of the times: there is no ceremony any more. The poet puts forth an imaginative solution to the dilemma of the loss of ritual, using the pre-Christian ancient burial chambers found in the Boyne Valley, outside of Dublin. He imagines a time when “arbitration” has placated the great feud (Protestant versus Catholic), when all the people will head out to a collective burial mound to honor the dead, with the dead laid out like a Viking lord inside his burial mound, “though dead by violence/ and unavenged.” Heaney uses a particular kind of metaphor here called metonymy: the Viking lord represents Ireland’s dead, the result of the clash between Catholic and Protestant. In his imagination, the killing will have stopped and the dead can chant “verses about honour.” The ending is a beauty: at a certain moment the burial chamber opens to the heavens, and the corpse turns with a “joyful face/to look at the moon.” This last part is, of course, in keeping with the structure of the burial chambers (passage graves) in the Boyne Valley, their box windows over the entrance lintel and their relationship to ancient astronomy, especially the sun.

Fortunately, times are changing for the better. Now the Irish Republic, created in 1949, wounded by its short but bloody Civil War before World War II, is making swift progress towards economic well being with the help of the European Union and its own ingenuity; and Northern Ireland, with its Protestant domination in the professions and in governance, and with its close ties to England, its suppression of the Catholic majority resulting in terrorism and fighting in the streets, has started turning the corner in civil rights and professional and governmental opportunities for Catholics, especially since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In both countries, the principle of separation of church and state has led to more open societies. Furthermore, there is currently under consideration in Northern Ireland joint governance of Catholics and Protestants. Things are looking up.

A friend once observed, although in a different context, that the only other society that has aroused such passionate response from its writers is Russia. Eavan Boland sums it up, and more, in her poem “Irish Poetry” (Code , Carcanet Press Limited, 2001) from which I took “heartbroken pantheon” as the title of Section II:

“We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland.
No music stored at the doors of hell.
No god to make it.
No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it.

But I remember an evening when the sky
was underworld-dark at four,
when ice had seized every part of the city
and we sat talking –
the air making a wreath for our cups of tea.

And you began to speak of our own gods.
Our heartbroken pantheon.

No Attic light for them and no Herodotus.
But thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap
of the sharp cliffs
they spent their winters on.

And the pitch-black Atlantic night:
how the sound
of a bird’s wing in a lost language sounded.

You made the noise for me.
Made it again.
Until I could see the flight of it; suddenly

the silvery lithe rivers of the south-west
lay down in silence
and the savage acres no one could predict
were all at ease, soothed and quiet and

listening to you, as I was. As if to music, as if to peace.”

© Joyce Nower