“Celibacy.” This treatment of a hermit’s struggle with lust combines Clarke’s personal conflicts with the Catholic Church’s sexual teachings and his sympathy with the hermit’s spiritual calling in a finely controlled, ironic commentary on the contemporary Irish suspicion of sex. Clarke achieves this irony through a series of images that juxtapose the monk’s self-conscious heroism to his unconscious self-indulgence. The rhyming and assonantal patterns in this poem are an early example of the successful use of the sound patterns borrowed from Gaelic models that became one of the distinctive characteristics of his work.

Night and Morning

With the publication of Night and Morning, there is a considerable consolidation of power. In this collection of sterling consistency, Clarke succeeds in harnessing the historical elements to his personal voice and vision. In the exposition of the central theme of the drama of racial conscience, he shows himself to be basically a religious poet. The central problems faced here are the burden to the contemporary generation of a body of truth received from the centuries of suffering and refinement, the limitations of religious faith in an age of sexual and spiritual freedom, and the conflicts arising from a sympathy with and a criticism of the ordinary citizen. Clarke’s own position is always ambivalent. While he seems to throw down the gauntlet to the dogmatic Church, his challenge is never wholehearted: He is too unsure of his position outside the institution he ostensibly abjures. This ambivalence is borne out in the fine title poem in this volume, in the implications of the Christian imagery of the Passion, the candle, the celebration of the Mass, the Incarnation, and the double lightning of faith and reason. A confessional poem, “Night and Morning” protests the difficulties in maintaining an adult faith in the Christian message in a skeptical age. Although it criticizes the lack of an intellectual stiffening in modern Irish Catholicism and ostensibly yearns for the medieval age when faith and reason were reconciled, the poem’s passion implies an allegiance to the Church that is more emotional than intellectual. These ambiguities are deftly conveyed by the title, design, tone, and imagery of the poem.

Almost every poem in this volume shows Clarke at his best, especially “Martha Blake,” “The Straying Student,” and “The Jewels.” In “Martha Blake,” a portrait of a devout daily communicant, Clarke manages multiple points of view with lucidity and ease. From one perspective, Martha’s blind faith is depicted as heroic and personally valid; from another, Martha is not very aware of the beauty of the natural world around her, although she experiences it vicariously through the ardor of her religious feelings; from a third, as in the superb final stanza, the poet shares with his readers a simultaneous double perspective that balances outer and inner visions, natural and supernatural grace. The ambiguity and irony that permeate this last stanza are handled with a sensitivity that, considering the anguish and anger of so much of his religious verse, reveals a startling degree of sympathy for ordinary, sincere Christians. He sees that a passionate nature may be concealed, and may be fulfilling itself, beneath the appearances of a simple devotion.

Ancient Lights

When, after a long silence, Ancient Lights appeared in 1955, Clarke had turned from his earlier historical and personal mode to a public and satirical posture. These poems comment wittily on current issues controversial in the Ireland of the early 1950’s: the mediocrity and piety of public life, “scandalous” women’s fashions, the domination of Irish public opinion by the Catholic Church, the “rhythm” method of birth control, and the incipient public health program. Many of these poems may appear quaint and require annotations even for a post-Vatican II Irish audience. The lead poem, “Celebrations,” for example, in criticizing the smug piety of postrevolutionary Ireland, focuses on the Eucharistic Congress held in Dublin in 1932. The poem is studded with references to the Easter Rising of 1916, its heroic antecedents and its promise for the new nation. These are set in ironic contrast with the jobbing latter-day politicians who have made too easy an accommodation with the Church and have thus replaced the British with a native oppression. Clarke vehemently excoriates the manner in which the public purse is made to subscribe to Church-mandated institutions. Despite its highly compressed content, this poem succeeds in making a direct statement on an important public issue. Unfortunately, the same is not true of many of Clarke’s subsequent satires, which degenerate into bickering over inconsequential subjects, turn on cheap puns, or lapse into doubtful taste.

This cannot be said, however, of the title poem of this volume, one of Clarke’s best achievements. Autobiographical and literally confessional, it can be profitably read in conjunction with his memoir, Twice ’Round the Black Church: Early Memories of Ireland and England (1962), especially pages 138-139. It begins with the familiar Clarke landscape of Catholic Dublin and the conflict between adolescent sex and conscience. Having made a less than full confession, the persona guiltily skulks outside, pursued by a superstitious fear of retribution.

Emerging into the light like an uncaged bird, in a moment reminiscent of that experienced by James Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus on the beach, the protagonist experiences an epiphany of natural grace that sweeps his sexual guilt away. The Church-induced phobias accumulated over the centuries drop away in a moment of creative self-assertion. This experience is confirmed in nature’s own manner: driven by a heavy shower into the doorway of the Protestant black church (for the full significance of the breaking of this sectarian taboo, see again his memoir), he experiences a spiritual catharsis as he observes the furious downpour channeled, contained, and disposed by roof, pipe, and sewer. With the sun’s reappearance, he is born again in a moment of triumphant, articulate joy.

The narrative direction, tonal variety, and especially the virtuosity of the final stanza establish this poem as one of Clarke’s finest creations. It weaves nostalgia, humor, horror, vision, and euphoria into a series of epiphanies that prepare the reader for the powerful conclusion. This last stanza combines the images of penance with baptism in a flood of images that are precisely observed and fraught with the spiritual significance for which the reader has been prepared. It should be noted, however, that even here Clarke’s resolution is consciously qualified: The cowlings and downpipes are ecclesiastical, and the flood’s roar announces the removal of but “half our heavens.” Nevertheless, in the control and energy of its images and sound patterns, the poem realizes many of Clarke’s objectives in undertaking to write poetry that dramatizes the proverbial tensions between art, religion, and nature in the national conscience.

Satire and irony

In the nineteen years following the publication of Ancient Lights, Clarke produced a continuous stream of satires on occasional issues, few of which rise above their origins. They are often hasty in judgment, turgid almost beyond retrieval, or purely formal exercises. These later volumes express a feeling of alienation from modern Ireland, in its particular mix of piety and materialism. Always mindful of the myths lying behind Irish life, his critique begins to lose its currency and sounds quixotically conservative. Then in the early 1960’s, with the arrival of industrialization in Ireland, relative prosperity, and the Church reforms following Vatican II, many of Clarke’s criticisms of Irish life become inapplicable and his latter-day eroticism sounds excessively self-conscious and often in poor taste. Nevertheless, some of his later lyrics, such as “Japanese Print,” and translations from the Irish are quite successful: lightly ironic, relaxed, matching the spirit of their originals.

Mnemosyne Lay in Dust

The most impressive personal poem of this last phase in his career is the confessional Mnemosyne Lay in Dust. Based on his experiences during a lengthy stay at a mental institution some forty years before, it recrosses the battleground between his inherited Jansenism and his personal brand of secular humanism. In harrowing, cacophonic verse, the poem describes the tortured hallucinations, the electric shock treatment, the amnesia, the pain of rejection by “Margaret” (his first wife), the contemplated suicide, and the eventual rejection of religious taboos for a life directed to the development of reason and human feeling. For all its extraordinary energy, however, this poem lacks the consistency and finish of his shorter treatments of the same dilemma.

Final phase

The last phase of Clarke’s poetic career produced a group of poems on erotic subjects that affirm, once again, his belief in the full right to indulge in life’s pleasures. The best of these—such as “Anacreontic” and “The Healing of Mis”—are remarkably forthright and witty and are not marred by the residual guilt of his earlier forays into this subject.

Clarke’s oeuvre is by turns brilliant and gauche. Learned and cranky, tortured and tender, his work moves with extraordinary commitment within a narrow range of concerns. His quarrels with Irish Catholicism and the new Irish state, his preoccupation with problems of sexuality and with Irish myth and history, and his technical emulation of Irish-language models set him firmly at the center of Irish poetry after Yeats. These considerations place him outside the modernist movement. In Ireland, he has been more highly rated by literary historians than by the younger generation of poets. Recognition abroad is coming late: In about twenty poems, he has escaped from his largely self-imposed chains to gain the attention of the world at large.